AI may take jobs, but it makes starting a business easier than ever - here's how (www.zdnet.com)

Widespread layoffs and economic uncertainty are pushing tech professionals toward entrepreneurship, and AI is lowering the upfront barriers to starting a company. The story notes major job cuts—Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 153,074 U.S. layoffs in October—and argues that AI tools and agentic platforms make it far cheaper and faster to prototype and launch products. Influencers and founders tout “vibe coding” and niche-first approaches (pick a vertical, build quickly, do lightweight marketing, apply to incubators like Y Combinator), and some predict a boom in solo founders as AI shifts productive capacity from large firms to individuals (the piece cites WhatsApp’s outsized value with a tiny team as a historical parallel). But the article stresses this is only the beginning: AI eases early-stage development but doesn’t replace business execution. Practical advice includes setting modest financial targets, using AI to solve initial engineering/back-end needs, leveraging incubators, and running small demos to validate demand. Important technical caveats remain—AI-generated systems can mask data provenance, security, and compliance risks, and require active human oversight and ongoing engineering to be production-ready. In short, AI lowers the cost and time of launching experiments, accelerating innovation for practitioners, but success still depends on execution, operations, and responsible engineering.