BLOG | MIT lands in Aberdeen with inspirational AI tools

I can hear the dance music before I even push open the door to ONE TechHub on Schoolhill. This is not going to be an ordinary day in the office. It’s 09.30 on Tuesday morning and the café is filled with North East company founders, expectantly waiting for an artificial intelligence (AI) workshop led by Paul Cheek, serial tech entrepreneur, Senior Advisor to the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

It’s hard to do Paul justice in print. Picture the highest energy person you’ve ever met. Double it. Make them endlessly positive, inspiring, very credible and you’ll come close to Paul. A Duracell bunny in human form!

I look around for my seat. The audience is mixed – different sectors, different demographics, different reasons for being here. I spot founders from digital tech, life sciences, food and drink. I see mentors, representatives from the universities and also some friendly faces from earlier in the year.

You see, this isn’t my first brush with MIT. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to join a cohort of north east founders funded by Opportunity North East in Boston for the Entrepreneurial Development Programme at MIT. That is the platinum standard of entrepreneurial education – a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn the Disciplined Entrepreneurship (DE) framework from the man who literally wrote the book on it, Bill Aulet.

For six days, the north east cohort and another 60 participants from around the world were immersed in learning the 24-step framework that MIT uses to frame all their entrepreneurial training, bringing it to life by developing a business from scratch with a random team of course-mates. It was a blitz of classroom learning, coaching and hands on application, finishing with a pitch session in front of globally successful MIT alumni and the rest of the class. Quite the experience.

But not everyone can go to Boston – so ONE has brought Boston to Aberdeen as part of a drive to embed the DE framework here and support the region’s entrepreneurial talent to innovate, commercialise and grow, potentially yielding the world’s next big scale-up.

We hear a lot about AI these days and I was curious to see how Paul, a huge advocate for the transformational impact of this technology – which he says is still in the ‘dial up’ phase of development - would approach this.

Paul kicks off by explaining AIDEs – AI Driven Enterprises. This is MIT language! Innovation Driven Enterprises are companies that will grow and scale rapidly with the potential to internationalise. IDE growth is fast but usually requires high capital investment at the very start (R&D costs and capacity building). AIDEs use AI to reduce those early costs, get to market quicker and achieve rapid growth with a lower headcount.

Paul then introduces us to the AI tool Jetpack, developed by MIT – a “co-founder in your pocket”, demonstrating live how it takes the earliest of ideas and turns it into a business plan.

The room is buzzing – Paul takes a high energy approach, bringing theory to life using case studies of familiar successful companies like Shopify and Lovable, live demonstrations of the AI tools he is using and pulls in the audience with questions and reflections, so we all feel involved.

We break for lunch, sent on our way with a teaser – “after lunch, I’ll create an AIDE start up from scratch in 30 minutes”. Surely not possible.

Turns out it is. Barely half an hour into the afternoon session and Paul has taken us through a whirlwind of different AI tools that generate customer research, create marketing personas, suggest business models, financial forecasts and even create a pitch deck for investment. In 30 minutes –half the time we spent eating sandwiches in the café for lunch we have a business plan. It’s exciting. You can feel the room thinking this through – how can I use this in my business??

The final session is really interactive. We’re broken into groups and asked to work out how we can use AI to meet the biggest challenge for our business, using what we’ve learned earlier that day. I decide that my website needs some work to get information to the right customers, so I give Manis AI a try. Rather than Chat GPT or CoPilot, where the user (me!) stays in control and steers the process with lots of prompts, I just set Manis AI an objective and it gets it done. In this case, taking content about my product and uploading it to my website in a way that will get more customers clicking on it – known as Search Engine Optimisation. It’s fast and surprisingly straightforward.

All too quickly it’s over and with a quick goodbye to Paul, I’m spilling out into the late afternoon sun in Schoolhill, still incredulous at the pace, with a head full of new tools and techniques and an action plan for applying AI to my business.

It’s been a whirlwind of a day, one that has equipped us with the skills needed to do our bit to help make Aberdeen and the wider region a breeding ground for AI and the game changing companies of tomorrow.