New research released this week from Edelman Data and Samsung Mobile suggests we’re about to enter a new era of the ‘AI powered side hustle’.
The study gathered responses from an online survey of thousands of Gen Z folk from the U.S., France, Germany, UK and Korea, and discovered, surprise, that most were unhappy with their current working conditions.
The survey suggested a good 70% were disgruntled enough to be thinking about starting a side hustle using AI as their tool of choice.
Apart from the tired and obvious theme of young people hating cubicles, there’s no question that the rise and rise of AI is creating an atmosphere of ‘maybe I could’ that didn’t exist before. Which makes sense if you think about it.
Starting a startup
I’ve set up six startups in my career, some of which imploded spectacularly and others which still thrive today. The one thing you learn as a small entrepreneur is it’s hard work to do everything yourself.
Even in small teams, there’s never enough time to focus fully on any one task, whether it’s marketing, sales, tech development or accounting. It’s this tsunami of work that a good AI can easily help with, so it’s easy to see why digital natives see the new tech as a natural ally in the fight to break free of the bad boss machine.
The main problem with the current thinking, if the Edelman report is to be believed, is the fact that the responders seemed to be aiming too low.
The top three use cases of AI covered in the report range from summarizing long documents to developing new content. Hmm…a billion dollar business revolution starts with a cat meme?
Luckily for our earnest natives, there’s a tidal wave of AI products heading their way which will probably do a whole lot more for their creative business ambitions than just delivering summaries.
AI inspiring creativity
One example I’ve been playing with is the strangely named Venturusai. This AI service lets budding entrepreneurs run their idea through a range of evaluation protocols before they start to devote serious time and money. So they can produce an instant SWOT analysis to highlight strengths and weaknesses in their concept, as well as generate a number of reports covering things such as competitive activity, ideal customer persona and a go-to-market strategy.
The current version runs on older AI models, and locks many of the goodies behind a $20 a month paywall, but it’s still cheaper than a slick expense accounted consultant.
Another of my fave tools is the clever Read AI. This cloud based service offers automated AI meeting recording, transcription and assistant. That sounds boring, but in reality the tool delivers a bunch of cool automated meeting functions. This includes identifying audience reactions, AI coaching, and intelligent wrap-up summaries.
The premium plans even offer a two minute highlight reel of the pivotal moments in each meeting. The fact that it integrates with calendars, and so can do all of this automagically, is icing on the cake.
Now these tools are not perfect, after all they’re relying on a constant drip feed of AI models which are still very much a work in progress, but they clearly demonstrate the future trajectory of this kind of smart business technology. This is AI in its infancy, and every week it gets better.
For Gen Z bedroom moghuls with ambition, I would also suggest a quick look at CodeCompanion AI. It’s billed as an ‘AI coding assistant’, but that masks a hyper effective programming tool which can literally create a full fledged coding project using just a text prompt. The product is the brainchild of Alex Hedrevich, a serial startup entrepreneur, who believes that AI is finally ready to deliver on its early promise.
“AI code assistants are revolutionizing the startup space,” he confirms, “We’ve got customers using our product to take their ideas from zero to a fully working prototype and beyond in a fraction of the time it would usually take. Plain English is the hottest programming language in the world right now, and this is only the start.”
When I tested it out a few weeks back, I managed to create full blown Firefox and Chrome browser extensions from scratch, simply by typing my orders into a text box. They both took a fair bit of trial and error to create, but the final results worked perfectly, and I'm definitely not a programmer in any way.
So is the AI side hustle a pipe dream or a genuine opportunity?
Right now the people saying it can’t be done, should probably get out of the way of those who are actually doing it.
For every naysayer, there’s a growing number of young ambitious wannapreneurs from Bangalore to Baltimore who are pushing the envelope to see how far they can go.
The driving force is a fledgling AI industry which is still finding its feet, but all the signs are that very soon things will come together to unleash a new generation of cubicle haters onto the AI loving startup world.
