A.I. Is Helping to Launch New Businesses

Sean Ammirati has been teaching a class on entrepreneurship for more than a decade.

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Ammirati has groups of mostly graduate students start businesses from scratch over the course of the spring semester. Some of the start-ups that his 49 students created this year were classic examples of the form: a dating app for couples in long-distance relationships, a personalized fitness app.

But Mr. Ammirati also noticed something unusual.

“I have a pretty good sense how fast the progress that students should make in a semester should be,” he said. “In 14 years, I’ve never seen students make the kind of progress that they made this year.”

And he knew exactly why that was the case. For the first time, Mr. Ammirati had encouraged his students to use generative artificial intelligence as part of their process — “think of generative A.I as your co-founder,” he recalled telling them.

The students began sharing their ideas for use cases on a dedicated Slack channel. They used generative A.I. tools such ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and FlowiseAI to help them with tasks including marketing, coding, product development and recruitment of early customers.

By the end of the class in May, venture capitalists were descending on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh.

“It felt to me like what I felt like in the mid-2000s, when cloud and mobile happened at the same time,” said Mr. Ammirati, who is himself an entrepreneur. Generative A.I., he believed, could similarly change innovation “by an order of magnitude.”