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Entrepreneurship is booming in the U.S. Gen Zers are
leading the way.
For Melanie Herbert, years of hospital treatments for a
serious medical condition fueled an early interest in how
healthcare providers communicate and address their
patients' needs.
The experience informed her decision years later to
launch Sync Labs, a health technology startup that aims
to improve care for older Americans, while she was still a
student at the University of Pennsylvania.
"I feel like it's unfortunately a very neglected space where
a lot of the technology and tools are really behind,"
Herbert, 23, told CBS News.
Although such entrepreneurship is clearly unusual for
young people, it is by no means unheard of these days.
Research from the Bank of America Institute shows that
Generation Z members are contributing
"disproportionately" to a recent surge in business
formation.
In a trend that highlights how younger Americans are helping catalyze economic growth, the number of new
business applications filed by Gen Zers jumped 66% in
June compared with a year ago. That far outpaced
applications filed by other generations, the Bank of
America Institute found.
Young Americans are helping fuel a broader jump in
applications to form businesses. According to the Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Americans filed more than
531,000 business applications in June, more than double
the 2020 figure.
Scott Issen, CEO of Future Founders, a nonprofit group
that helps nurture entrepreneurial skills, said demand for
the organization's services is surging a shift he
attributes to a change in many young people's attitude
toward employment.
"Macroeconomically, I think there's less interest year over
year for young people to work for others," he told CBS
News. "They would prefer to be their own bosses and
create their own opportunity."
The burst in entrepreneurship among younger Americans
isn't limited to graduates of prestigious universities.
Lower-income households now account for 25% of all
new businesses getting off the ground, up from 20% in
2020, the Bank of America Institute found.
"In a lot of ways, I think entrepreneurship is
democratizing right now," said Angela Lee, co-director of
the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia
Business School. "So I'm not at all surprised to see
younger, lower-income founders start companies."
AI lowers barriers to entry
Experts attribute part of the surge in Gen Z founders to
the advent of artificial intelligence, which is helping young
people get their businesses off the ground by automating
basic tasks and reducing startup costs.
"The barriers to entry are getting much lower," Lori
Rosenkopf, a professor at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania, told CBS News. "It's pretty
easy for anyone to start building some content, making
themselves a content creator or doing a little bit of vibe
coding."
AI can also help young business founders save money.
Lee, a serial entrepreneur, said she paid roughly $15,000
for a single web developer when she started her first
company.
"Now with AI, something that would have taken an app
developer three months and $15,000, you can vibe code
over the weekend," she said.
AI is integral to Herbert's company, which uses the
technology to streamline information from health
providers' notes, staff observations, lab results and other
data. For example, Sync Labs' tech can "ambiently listen"
to staff meetings when activated, creating a fuller picture
of patient needs and offering clinically backed
recommendations from the company's generative AI
models, she said.
Herbert also said AI has been a "game changer" for daily operations at the San Francisco-based company, noting
that it helps speed up tasks and reduce expenses. "As a
startup, time is everything," she said. "We're trying to get
our product out to as many people as possible as quickly
as possible."
"There is a lot of job dislocation right now"
Today's challenging economic backdrop and the rise
of AI also helps explain why more young Americans
are choosing to launch their own businesses, experts
said.
"There is a lot of job dislocation right now, and younger
people are finding it hard to secure traditional
employment given our current economic conditions,"
Wharton's Rosenkopf said.
Although U.S. unemployment remains low and job growth
has been solid, research shows that recent college
graduates are struggling to find work, especially as AI
starts to automate certain functions normally reserved for
entry-level workers. A recent ZipRecruiter survey of 1,000
recruiters found that 38% of employers have shifted basic
data-processing tasks away from entry-level workers and
onto AI.
Herbert said she didn't start Sync Labs due to concerns
about the labor market, but noted that the stress of
finding a job has weighed heavily on her friends.
"Being in this generation, it's probably one of the most
talked about things," she said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gen-z-business-applications-surge-ai/
