Tag: small companies

Serial entrepreneur, business visionary, and — not coincidentally — billionaire Mark Cuban has repeatedly urged both young and older people to develop artificial intelligence (AI) skills, and use those to tap into the enormous career-building potential these tools offer. More recently, Cuban expanded on his advice by counseling job seekers to market their AI experience to small businesses, not the big corporations now spending billions adopting the tech.

Cuban is clearly convinced AI is set to transform business in ever bigger ways than his Cost Plus Drug company revolutionized pharmaceutical markets. To get in on that change, Cuban has been encouraging people — including his own children — to spend all their free time to “learn all you can about AI,” and exploit the “unique opportunity” it offers employees and companies. Of late, the 67-year-old entrepreneur has honed that message even more by telling current and future job seekers to forget trying to use those AI skills to secure work with leading corporations, and instead focus on the far more numerous opportunities at small businesses.

“They have to compete differently, and they don’t have the resources to just, you know, have a huge IT department,” Cuban told CivicScience CEO John Dick on his “Dumbest Guy in the Room” podcast recently. “So, they’re going to go to kids just like we saw with the early days of the internet. You hired young kids who were more comfortable with it, who learned it already and could come in and implement new things.”

In making that point, Cuban didn’t ignore the fact that big companies are spending billions of dollars both developing and adopting AI tools to automate countless workplace tasks previously performed by humans. But as part of that, he said those corporations are also investing considerable amounts of money to hire top tech workers, not recruiting at lower levels that would be open to most job seekers.

“The large companies are trying to use AI to cut back and they have the resources to understand how to implement it, apply it to processes,” Cuban said. “They have great AI people.”

He further detailed that thought recently in comments to CNBC.

“Small- to medium-size companies don’t have that depth,” Cuban told the business channel. “They are typically entrepreneurially driven and don’t have the flexibility to have people research things. Bringing a new graduate on to work on agentic AI projects is inexpensive for them and can get them immediate results.”

Moreover, small businesses are not only more numerous than corporations, but will use AI — and the new recruits helping them adopt it — differently. He cited his own Cost Plus Drugs company as an example of how that works.

“Small- to medium-size businesses like our size companies, we need people that understand AI and agentics, (and) can go and look at our processes and automate them using AI,” Cuban told the podcast. “And as we grow it, you know, (recruits) help us become more productive, competitive, and profitable using AI. And so I think redirecting kids as they graduate from college in particular to small -to medium-sized businesses as opposed to trying to work for a big company (is wise).”

Cuban admitted not all his three college-age children are fans of AI, with one daughter particularly soured on it due to its enormous energy consumption.

But he said he continues urging all his kids — and other future and current employees — to embrace the tech, and use it to take their careers to new, higher places over time. The alternative, he warns them, is that people and businesses who snub the quickly developing and spreading AI tools risk finding themselves on the outside looking in.

“I tell them, like I tell every young kid, there’s going to be two types of companies in this in this country,” Cuban said. “There’s going to be those who are great at AI and those who used to be in business. There’s no in between.”

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