4 Things Marc Andreessen Says All Founders Should Be Doing With AI to Beat the Competition

You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger evangelist of artificial intelligence than Marc Andreessen. The venture capitalist’s a16z has invested tens of billions of dollars in AI companies and continues to look for opportunities. But his enthusiasm for the technology goes beyond financial interests. He’s also a proponent of business owners taking better advantage of AI’s offerings. On a recent episode of the a16z podcast, Andreessen discussed how founders, business owners, and anyone with entrepreneurial instincts should be using AI to gain an advantage over the competition. While hundreds of millions of people have access to AI in the palm of their hands, the majority aren’t using it as a tool (other than punching up their emails). AI mastery, he said, is a skill. And just as people who plunk out “Chopsticks” on a piano can’t play Chopin on the first try, casual AI users won’t have the ability to utilize the technology to its peak potential. To do that, you’ll need to study some and use AI regularly, learning how to ask good prompts. “There are a slice of people who just use these new systems all the time, like literally all day for everything,” he said. “In a lot of cases, they’re reporting that they’re getting enormous benefits from that.” 1. Ask what you should be asking One of the biggest hurdles in learning AI is the intimidation factor. New technology can be overwhelming, even for people in the tech space—doubly so when it’s regularly referred to as revolutionary and world-changing. What Andreessen suggests, though, is using AI to learn about AI. “You can ask it: ‘What question should I be asking?'” he said “[AI] is actually a thought partner helping you figure out what questions to ask … You can say, teach me how to use you in the best way … Teach me how to use you for my business.” AI systems, he noted, love to talk—and the more they tell you about themselves and how to find the information you want, the more adept you’ll become at operating them. 2. Think of AI as a business coach The best coaches in sports are patient with their players, helping them run plays again and again until those become second nature. Business coaches possess a similar trait, helping business owners (and sometimes teams) improve their performance and hone leadership skills. AI, Andreessen said, is like that, but on steroids. It is, quite literally, impossible to frustrate, so no matter what pace you need to proceed at and no matter how many follow-up questions you have, it will never get cross with you. “It’s like having the world’s best coach, mentor, therapist, right?” he said. “It’s infinitely patient. It’s happy to have the conversation. It’s happy to have the conversation 50 times. It’s happy if you admit your insecurities—it’ll coach you through them. It’s happy if you run wild speculations that don’t make any sense. It’s happy to do all that at 4:00 in the morning.” 3. Use AI to find problems with your thinking AI can not only make suggestions about directions for your business, but also look at how you’re running the company now and point out possible mistakes. Whether it’s staffing, marketing, customer feedback, expansion plans, strategy, or performance assessments, if you share information that is accurate and unbiased with the AI and ask for feedback, you’ll get candid advice and criticism that can help you correct mistakes you might not realize you were making. (Just be sure your data is protected.) 4. Use it to draw on lessons from other founders Not every founder is an expert when it comes to scaling. But if you’re looking to grow your business, it’s an essential skill. If the thought of an expansion roadmap is paralyzing, your AI companion has a wealth of knowledge to draw from. “Because it’s been trained on some large percentage of the total amount of human knowledge, it has all the information on how Ray Kroc turned McDonald’s from a single restaurant and how all these other entrepreneurs before actually did this,” he said. “So it can explain [to] you and help you figure out how to do this for your own business.” BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE