Why AI Entrepreneurship Matters for High School Students
The emergence of artificial intelligence technologies fundamentally changes the rules of game for entrepreneurs, opening up a completely new field where high school students do not require venture funding or a doctorate degree to create something meaningful. The preparation for such kind of career does not mean that one should create a multi-million dollar startup before graduating from school; it means gaining certain skills related to technical competence, problem solving and being an entrepreneur.
The first step is to understand what the technology is without falling into the trap of thinking that one needs to create machine learning algorithms. One has to learn the capabilities and limitations of the AI, how to integrate it via API using coding and no/low code solutions.
It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of loving the technology itself, rather than the solution that technology provides to some real-world friction, which is how successful entrepreneurs work backwards. This kind of thinking can be trained by identifying areas of inefficiency around you, be it a struggle at the school level with analyzing video footage to a local business taking hours to create content manually, and creating simple AI workflows that solve the problem. With the constant evolution of the AI space on a weekly basis, trying to wait for the perfect time to enter is never going to pay off; therefore, building in public and learning from iterative failures in the process by publicly sharing what is being built is a much more productive way forward. Ultimately, in order to sustain a future in this field, an ethical perspective is crucial, which means that one needs to think about data privacy, intellectual property, and bias from day one. Nothing needs to hold anyone back because the best way to prepare is simply choosing a small bottleneck in your life and experimenting with it right away.
