Helping people create their own jobs must be part of Northern Ireland’s answer to AI

By Neil Crockett, Chairman of Catalyst

AI is scary. We’ve all seen the headlines over the past couple of years telling us that it’s coming for our jobs, that the role you do today will be obsolete by next year, that employers now only need a fraction of the graduates coming out of university that they used to.

It’s true, AI is causing labour markets around the world to rethink and restructure and Northern Ireland will not avoid it. For existing businesses in a wide range of sectors, AI will change, and is already changing their business models and the shape of their workforce.

But there is another side to the AI coin. It will also empower a lot more people to create their own businesses. It will enable and accelerate a new wave of AI driven enterprises (AIDEs) and entrepreneurs. AI makes becoming an entrepreneur more accessible to everyone.

AI can code and test so a concept can become a product without specialist tech skills, customers can be identified qualified and demand tested without months of research, websites and marketing can be produced quickly and automated operating processes developed and deployed. New businesses can get from set up to first paying customers in weeks not years.

The barriers that have traditionally slowed down NI entrepreneurs such as specialist tech or engineering skills, hard to get start up investment and distance from markets, are dissolved.

This is not just theory. The disciplined approach to building companies developed at MIT has a 69% five-year survival rate in independent research, and in Canada the Lab2Market programme has produced 132 new start-ups from more than 1,000 participants. Its new AI-focused successor, AI2Market, is layering today’s tools on top of that same discipline. The magic is not AI alone, or method alone, but the two combined.

The opportunity here is not just a new wave of “tech bro” entrepreneurs selling AI enabled tech tools. It’s about helping people who have a passion, lived experience or deep know-how about a niche problem in their community to convert it into a solution and a business that may not be the next unicorn but can grow and create opportunity. Probably most importantly this includes a huge opportunity to include those who today are furthest from entrepreneurial opportunity socially and geographically.

At Catalyst creating and supporting entrepreneurship is what we do. We were recently ranked by the Financial Times as the leading start-up hub on the island of Ireland and the only hub in the top ten in the UK outside London, thanks to the quality of our partners, programmes, people, facilities and network.  

Our belief is that entrepreneurs aren’t born. They can be made – particularly in this new AI era.

Independent research produced by the National Centre for Family Business at DCU Business School found that almost 90% of participants in our recent Hello Possible programme would start their own business if given the chance to learn entrepreneurial skills and increase their confidence.

The programme, delivered by Catalyst and funded by the Department for the Economy, was designed to help people from under-represented groups across Northern Ireland explore self-employment and business creation as a credible pathway. What set it apart from a traditional enterprise course was the method. Rather than stopping at confidence and inspiration, it moved people through a structured process to test real demand and validate a genuine business opportunity, the same discipline that, paired with today’s AI tools, now compresses what once took years into weeks.

One new founder, Diane Reilly, said she wouldn’t have had the confidence or clarity to pursue the idea for her business Endovia, an early pre-consultation tool for women with endometriosis, despite having two decades of experience working in the NHS. By broadening Diane’s understanding of how technology could help accelerate diagnosis and support better health outcomes, she was able to take the first step in creating something she’s deeply passionate about.

As well as experienced first-time entrepreneurs like Diane, generational attitudes towards entrepreneurship are starting to shift amongst university students and younger people. This region has long had a low European ranking on entrepreneurial activity, so raising ambition is essential.

But while I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like the idea of Northern Ireland having more successful entrepreneurs and building on our proud history of innovation, that ambition has to be backed up.

These are testing times for government budgets and there are many competing priorities. But it is deeply worrying that at the very time this opportunity is opening up that the NI Executive has a heavily reduced budget for entrepreneurship.

Catalyst is doing all it can to present the evidence that this can work, but NI needs a change of gear and investment to scale up the AIDE opportunity.