Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, high-tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuba shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform the competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI is not the answer in itself. It is intended to serve as an aid that can help entrepreneurs by starting to grow the business and making it easier to answer questions along the way.
Cuba suggested that today's entrepreneurs should spend “every moment of learning about AI” on that possibility.
“The more rapidly it changes, the more changes there are,” he said, adding that for established companies that integrate AI, it's different compared to new businesses that just got off the ground.
“It's very easy to get started,” Cuba explained. “It's $5,000 for that day, for a PC. If you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can start with anything. Now you have a mentor, whether you use a baffling, humane Claude, chatgpt, gemini or not. That doesn't matter. There's an expert.”
He acknowledged that there are some issues with AIS, which involves making mistakes and hallucinating, but he said that human leaders and experts “do not always make it right.”
Despite the problems, AI “experts” can help you understand what you don't know and can help you in other areas of running your business, such as research, email, sales calls, and more.
However, Cuba warned the crowd not to rely too much on AI. “AI is never the answer. AI is a tool. No matter what skills you have, you can use AI to amplify them,” he said.
This is especially true in creative fields where AI is moving into fields such as art and writing.
“A lot of creative people think that AI is going to write all the scripts,” Cuba said. “AI doesn't know good stories from bad stories. You need to be creative. ai can run videos. Trust me, I can create videos generated to AI. They're still going to suck.”
“Whatever the skills you have, AI can amplify them. But not using them means someone else will amplify your skills. That could be a difference between moving ahead or not,” Cuba said.