Especially in my younger years, I always dreamt of starting my own business. As I grew older, this dream deteriorated a bit. My main issue was that I was struggling with starting off, as you need lots of creativity (or money) to create your own name, logo, site, etc. Nowadays however, one can seek help from AI, which significantly reduces the hurdle to actually get started with your own business. AI can help safe developing and design costs, as well as it could safe many man-hours. This got me wondering; what if, instead of AI assisting me with starting my own business, I would assist AI with starting his own business?
Consequently, I went to the Bing AI, which you can put on creative. Then I asked what kind of business I should start, the only thing that was important to me was that it should be sustainable. Bing gave me four interesting business ideas;
- You could start an organic catering business that provides meals made from organic and locally grown foods.
- You could start a sustainable landscaping business that offers eco-friendly gardening services to families and businesses.
- You could start an upcycling furniture business that transforms old and broken furniture into new and useful items.
- You could start a solar panel installation business that helps people and businesses switch to renewable energy.
I liked the sound of the first business idea. So I that was the one I went with. Of course, I also needed a name for the company. So asked the AI for recommendations for the name. He gave me several. I found it hard to chose, so I let the AI choose for itself. We ended up owning the name: “Eco-Chef Catering”. His reasoning was the following: “I like this name because it sounds modern and trendy, which could appeal to your target market. It also shows that you are a professional cook who cares about the environment, which is a great selling point for your business. Plus, it’s easy to spell and pronounce, which is important for a brand name.”
The next step was a logo. I asked the AI if he could come up with 3 logo’s using the bing image creator. The one I liked best is the following:
Anno 2023, the second thing you think about when starting a business is a website. Using the same prompt as for the logo, I let the AI design three versions of landing pages. The one below is the one that spoke most to me.
Now, there were only a few things we needed. A good looking menu and catchy packaging for the distribution of the food.
All in all, this whole process of creating a business idea, name, logo, website landing page, menu and packaging took less than half an hour. I was very impressed the pace by which the Bing AI was able to help me create a ‘business’. Essentially, the whole business was created by the AI itself.
I started this experiment more as a joke. But during the Christmas break I might actually try to co-manage a business, fully created and hopefully mainly managed by AI. One requirement is that the business has to be fully online and digital, unlike “Eco-Chef Catering”, which requires remote work and the procurement of many goods as well. If you have any experience with owning an AI made business, please feel free to comment and share your experiences!
Very interesting post. Of all the applications of Generative AI that I had seen, I had never come across something like this. It is very innovative, and really fascinating as a concept. A fully AI-created and managed business? I would love to see how that experiment would go. As someone who is also very interested in the world of entrepreneurship, I find this extremely interesting, and it already got me wondering how I could apply it myself. In my own experience, the hardest step for entrepreneurship seems to be the first one. Many times I have found myself having a good business idea, but I have fallen short of turning it into a venture. It is a scary process, mentally it feels like staring into a dark abyss and needing to leap off the ledge. You invest your time and your resources into something when you don’t even know if it will work or not. Seeing AI come up with its own business is both scary and encouraging, as I believe that there is enormous potential for gen AI to assist in the entrepreneurship process, and now I am a bit pissed at myself for not coming up with the idea earlier!
Really nice and creative post. I never thought about using AI for this purpose let alone that it could create ideas and even designs that look this good. And all this in almost no time. But this got me wondering about the risks as well when starting the business for real. As I learned during the entrepreneurship minor, starting a business requires a tremendous amount of time for market research, networking, validation and so on of which I think it still can’t be done by AI. What do you think the risks are of using AI for creating and running business and would you trust AI to make business decisions?
First of all, thanks for your comment. Although AI has basically learnt itself ‘business sense’ by absorbing a tremendeous amount of information, I indeed believe there are various risks of using AI for running a business. One of the main risks in my opinion is that most decisions would be rational or based on efficiency, while this can be good, sometimes, running a business requires taking a decision for the greater good. Furthermore, legally, I would be the would be the one responsible for his debt, which makes me doubt to what extend I would fully trust AI to make business decisions. However, I do believe AI is a vital asset when creating a business.