Business Tycoon Mark Cuban has recently handed out a business idea for aspiring entrepreneurs and gave his take about the future of AI or Artificial Intelligence.
In a recent guesting at HoopsHype, a sports podcast, Cuban talked about acquiring the NBA franchise, Dallas Mavericks, how having children changed his perspective as a businessman and other stuffs about being an elite.
But during the span of the interview, he talked about two business points – one being able to create a sustainable business from the ground up and two, about AI or Artificial Intelligence.
When the host asked him about putting himself in a better position financially if he had an average 9-to-5 job, he spilled a precious idea that anyone could start today:
“I’d probably get a job working as a bartender at night, just to make sure I had enough money to make ends meet.”
During the day, I’d probably start a company that did Alexa, Cortana and Google Home installation, configurations and customization for people. More and more people have an Alexa or Google Home in their house, but nobody knows how to really configure them to make them work well. I could go out there and charge $25-to-$50 an hour to do that. It’s not hard to learn; it’s really easy to stay up-to-date with that, but most people just don’t do it.
“I could also do that for businesses and, now, Alexa is being put in cars so there are ways to set up scripts for that. I think that would be one thing that I did. And I spend a lot of time trying to learn and understand as much as I can about artificial intelligence. I’d probably start a complementary business or, as part of my first business, I’d help small businesses apply artificial intelligence because it’s really hard for them to do. Most of them don’t understand it and they can’t afford to do it by themselves.”
Speaking of AI, the host pounded on that topic and further expounded about Cuban’s thoughts on the future of it. Mark didn’t hold back and made strong statements surrounding it.
The billionaire said that A.I. is quite similar to the early days of the internet in 1990’s but admitted that the former is quite more complicated than the latter.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, not even so much the internet because by the time the internet came along, people knew what would happen, they just didn’t know when. But [it reminds me of] the early days of computing when people didn’t understand the value of connecting PCs into local area networks. People used to just laugh at that. Or with remote communications, people just dismissed it and then their businesses suffered. Now, it’s A.I. and A.I. is hard. It’s harder to understand than the internet with web pages and JavaScript. It’s harder to understand than LANs and PCs and software. It’s a lot more complicated and doing it requires a lot more cost since you’re using Amazon Web Services or the different cloud services and it’s hard to know if you’re using the right data and if you’re getting it right when calculating things. It’s a lot more complicated and takes a lot more time, which makes it difficult for small businesses. Big businesses have it and understand it – the Googles, Facebooks, etc. We’re kind of in a world where companies are haves and have nots when it comes to A.I. It’s interesting because how it applies to sports, teams are starting to invest more than a lot of regular companies and they’re trying to understand the impact A.I. can have. It’s not just a hot area, it’s an important area and the impact is going to be enormous.
Would you try and pursue the business idea that Mark Cuban just handed out?