Startup Tactics<\/a>\u201d book.<\/p>\nThe Trust Center describes Jetpack\u2019s outputs as first drafts designed to help students brainstorm their next steps.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to verify everything when you are using AI to build a business,\u201d says Kenney, who is also a lecturer at MIT Sloan and MIT D-Lab. \u201cI have yet to meet anyone who will base their business on the output of something like ChatGPT without verifying everything first. Sometimes, the verification can take longer than if you had done the research yourself from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n
One company in this year\u2019s cohort, Mendhai Health, uses AI and telehealth to offer personalized physical therapy for women struggling with pelvic floor dysfunction before and after childbirth.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI has definitely made the entrepreneurial process more efficient and faster,\u201d says MBA student Aanchal Arora. \u201cStill, overreliance on AI, at least at this point, can hamper your understanding of customers. You need to be careful with every decision you make.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kenney notes the way large language models are built can make them less useful for entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome AI tools can increase your speed by doing things like automatically sorting your email or helping you vibe code apps, but many AI tools are built off averages, and those can be less effective when you\u2019re trying to connect with a very specific demographic,\u201d Kenney says. \u201cIt\u2019s not helpful to have AI tell you about an average person, you need to personally have strong validation that your specific customer exists. If you try to build a tool for an average person, you may build a tool for no one at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Students eager to embrace AI may also be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tools available today. Fortunately, MIT students have a long history of being at the forefront of any new technology, and this year\u2019s delta v cohort featured teams leveraging AI at the core of their solutions and in every step of their entrepreneurial journeys.<\/p>\n
MIT Sloan MBA candidate Murtaza Jameel, whose company Cognify uses AI to simulates user interactions with websites and apps to improve digital experiences, describes his firm as an AI-native business.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re building a design intelligence tool that replaces product testing with instant, predictive simulations of user behavior,\u201d Jameel explains. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to integrate AI into all of our processes: ideation, go to market, programming. All of our building has been done with AI coding tools. I have a custom bot that I\u2019ve fed tons of information about our company to, and it\u2019s a thought partner I\u2019m speaking to every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The more things change\u2026<\/p>\n
One of the fundamentals the Trust Center doesn\u2019t see changing is the need for students to get out of the lab or the classroom to talk to customers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are ways that AI can unlock new capabilities and make things move faster, but we haven\u2019t turned our curriculum on its head because of AI,\u201d Soltoff says. \u201cIn delta v, we stress first and foremost: What are you building and who are you building it for? AI alone can\u2019t tell you who your customer is, what they want, and how you can better serve their needs. You need to go out into the world to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, many of the biggest hurdles delta v teams faced this summer looked a lot like the hurdles entrepreneurs have always faced.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were prepared at the Trust Center to see a big change and to adapt to that, but the companies are still building and encountering the same challenges of customer identification, beachhead market identification, team dynamics,\u201d Kenney says. \u201cThose are still the big meaty challenges they\u2019ve always been working on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amid endless hype about AI agents and the future of work, many founders this summer still said the human side of delta v is what makes the program special.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to MIT with one goal: to start a technology company,\u201d Jameel says. \u201cThe delta v program was on my radar when I was applying to MIT. The program gives you incredible access to resources \u2014 networks, mentorship, advisors. Some of the top folks in our industry are advising us now on how to build our company. It\u2019s really unique. These are folks who have done what you\u2019re doing 10 or 20 years ago, all just rooting for you. That\u2019s why I came to MIT.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship strives to teach students the craft of entrepreneurship. Over the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[62868,84,4203,74532,74531,74530,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-164195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ai-in-business","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-macauley-kenney","12":"tag-mit-delta-v","13":"tag-mit-entrepreneurship","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}