As someone who always had a slight entrepreneurial spirit, constantly making up solutions for problems I would encounter in my daily life, one of the major issues I had was actually developing them. Now, this doesn’t mean I haven’t tried getting past the “just an idea” phase in my head, it’s just that it always seemed too hard and unachievable, and AI tools seemed like the solution. Although I had been skeptical of artificial intelligence tools in the past, I decided to run an experiment to see if I could build the structure of a business idea, more specifically an application, using AI alone.
First steps
Although I intend to repeat this experiment with a new set of tools I am now familiar with, such as Lovable, I remained conservative in the tools I used and stuck with the most obvious one: ChatGPT. For its first task, I described what I had envisioned for my idea, and asked for a summary of the business with potential upsides and downsides. To my surprise it did very well in the summary, depicting pretty much to perfection what the application entailed and what features I had envisioned for it. That said, regarding the upsides and the downsides of the business idea, it was vague and didn’t really go in-depth on why the app could fail, as it presented flaws that were not really specific to my application.
More complex tasks
Afterwards, I began asking for some more complex tasks: a guide on what steps I should take to fully develop my idea; a pitch; a market research; competitors analysis; step by step this Artificial Intelligence tool was building my business idea. The final verdict: good, but not great. Just like what I previously mentioned, a portion of its answers were just vague. Regarding research, ChatGPT was really good, having managed to do in seconds something that would take me days, but other than that it looked like all its advice on what the future should look like for my application, and what steps I should follow, were all a bit superficial. My final task for the AI tool, was regarding the design aspect. I asked for a logo, with a catchphrase, with specific colours I had previously chosen, and a certain theme I had associated with the brand. The result was actually really good, creating something that could be used in a professional context, turning out to be one of the high points of this experiment for me.
The takeaway
Of course, it wasn’t all bad. Even though throughout the experiment, the tool remained superficial in certain areas of the output it would give, it showed promising signs that in the future the scenario could be very different, and we could have businesses built exclusively with artificial intelligence, or at least that is my belief. For now, ChatGPT has immense purposes and utilities where it is already proficient, but developing a business idea and concept just isn’t up there quite yet, and it still requires a lot of human intervention.
It is up to me now to try new tools and combine their expertise with the researching capabilities of ChatGPT, to once again attempt to go even further and test whether or not artificial intelligence is capable of fully developing a core structure for a business idea to develop on. That said, what tools would you say I should try and pair up with ChatGPT, in order to get a better assessment if this experiment could have a better success rate or not? Have you had a different experience developing your own business concept strictly using AI?
As someone who has done something very similar to what you described, this Blog gives an interesting perspective. I have had the same questions and curiosities you write about and agree in most points, although, I like the current state of the AI. It can be useful and has tremendous potential but I like the aspect of entrepreneurship that requires someone to put to use their critical thinking instead of splurging an idea to AI system and let it do the work for them. A simple blog idea with a great storyline describing the use of AI. Especially the Logo section which I can relate a 100% as I thought AI was an amazing tool to design it in a matter of seconds. As a response to your question, I would suggest you to also try Claude.ai and even Gemini has come a long way after a shaky start 😉
Couldn’t agree more regarding the importance of critical thinking in entrepreneurship. I truly believe that at the end of the day, that is the essence of business developing! I’ll make sure to try out Claude and Gemini for my next attempt at this experiment, thank you for the recommendation!
True, what is often harder than coming up with new concepts or ideas is going from imagination to execution. I liked the blog because it captures something I have also felt when trying to turn an idea into something real.
Three weeks ago, I asked AI to help me structure an idea. It was excellent at organizing my thoughts, connecting the dots, and turning unclear concepts into something that looks like a real plan. But just like you said, it often felt too surface-level, missing that deeper strategic insight that usually comes from human intuition.
In my opinion, what makes this whole process interesting is the ability of AI to provide structure, speed, and clarity, but it still relies on us to give direction and judgment. Your idea of combining different tools is smart. Often, the weaknesses of some AI systems are covered when they are used together.