Ask young people how artificial intelligence (AI) will shape their careers, and you won’t hear much optimism. Researchers who put that very question to rising college students found half felt uncertain, a third felt concerned, and one in ten felt depressed.
It’s not hard to understand where these feelings come from. No group has been warned about AI more than college students. We can speak from experience: over the past few years, we’ve only heard the worst-case scenarios about what AI could do to our careers.
But no one has asked us the other question: what can AI do for our careers? The answer, we found, was very different from the future we had been warned about.
A few months ago, we were among the 86% of students who use generative AI in their coursework for small asks: a second explanation of a hard concept, a study guide built from lecture notes, a starting list of sources for a paper. And given how much of college rests on original work, our classes were not inviting us to experiment further.
So when we heard about the Build with Gemini XPRIZE competition, which invited teams to build an AI-powered business in 90 days, we entered. The competition would give us the AI experience our classes hadn’t. The opportunity to found a company, if we got that far, was the upside.
To get started, we asked small business owners about their experience launching a company. When we asked what the hardest part had been, the same answer kept coming back. It wasn’t the idea, the ambition, or even raising the money. It was the maze of online portals and paperwork standing between them and a real business.
That became the problem we set out to solve. Over the next several months, we built a tool to make founding a business less intimidating. And somewhere in the middle of the process, AI stopped feeling like a threat to the careers we were planning and became the tool we were using to build one.
In less than three months, we went from AI novices to the founders of an AI-powered business, LaunchBridge. Our platform can take an idea and a name and handle the rest: the LLC and EIN paperwork, a working website, and a payment system. Tasks that once took first-time business owners weeks now take 72 hours.
We entered this competition to simply learn about AI, not to prove a point about it. But in building the product, we ended up solving the very problem we had faced ourselves. AI closed the distance between what we wanted to build and the code we didn’t know how to write. It expanded what we could execute without replacing the ideas that still came from us.
And as we head back to campus, we’re taking two things with us: our company and an answer to that question no one had asked us: what can AI do for our careers? It can launch them.
Companies are already looking for AI literacy. From Fall 2025 to Spring 2026, the number of entry-level jobs requiring AI skills nearly tripled, going from 13.3% to 35%. And accordingly, over half of employers now say they are more likely to interview and hire candidates with AI experience.
For students without AI experience, it’s understandable that these numbers can feel unsettling. AI has been moving at a rapid pace, and what this means for our future careers is an important conversation.
But as students who once felt uncertain ourselves, we found that gaining a hands-on understanding of and directly working with AI helped ease our own concerns. Building our company showed us that AI did not replace or replicate our ideas; instead, it expanded what we were capable of as a small team of young entrepreneurs.
We understand that this journey does not make us AI experts or settle every question about what AI will mean for our future. But we do recommend engaging with AI tools directly. Enter a competition, build something small, or automate a problem no one asked you to solve. You may not walk away with every answer, but you’ll walk away with a head start and the confidence to navigate what comes next.
CHASE ROSEN and LEO FALL are students at the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and the co-founders of LaunchBridge. The project was named a Top 100 selection out of more than 1,400 entries in the Build with Gemini XPRIZE competition.
