Walk into any Georgetown Entrepreneurship classroom, pitch competition, or advising session this year and you’ll notice one thing right away: artificial intelligence isn’t a side topic anymore, it’s the toolkit. For our students, our faculty, our mentors, and the founders who’ve come through our programs, AI has moved from novelty to default, and Georgetown Entrepreneurship has been building the courses, community, and tools to match.
AI in the Classroom, From Day One
For students launching their first ventures, AI tools are no longer something to learn about later, they’re part of the build process from week one. In Professor Khuram Zaman’s “Launching Entrepreneurial Ventures” course for undergraduates, students ship a new feature for their startup every single week, using tools like Base44, Lovable, and Claude to move from idea to working product at a pace that simply wasn’t possible a few years ago. The result is a generation of student founders who treat AI-assisted building the way earlier generations treated a spreadsheet: a basic, expected part of the job. A student in Professor Zaman’s class remarked, “using AI to accelerate how fast we launch and test ideas allows us to ship positive impact to society sooner.”
That mindset shows up everywhere else, too. At recent pitch competitions like Bark Tank, AI isn’t just a feature bullet on a slide, it’s at the core of nearly every student venture in the room, from how products work to how the teams themselves operate.
A Faculty and Mentor Community Learning Together
Tools move fast, and keeping up with them takes real, deliberate effort, especially if you’re one of the faculty, Venture Advisors, Entrepreneurs in Residence, or Experts on Call guiding our founders day to day. That’s why we started the Entrepreneurship and AI Salon: a monthly Zoom gathering, always the last Friday of the month, where our community compares notes on how AI is actually changing entrepreneurial practice, and what that means for how we teach, advise, and mentor going forward.
The series has covered real ground. Doug Munk opened with a grounding session on AI and entrepreneurship; Khuram Zaman shared how he’s built AI into his coursework; Rick Robinson led a session on “vibe coding”; and Ken Wake introduced the community to a new idea entirely: an AI-powered “chatbot advisor” for Georgetown founders. Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, whose company Realworld.co has been transformed by AI, rounds out the series this summer.
Piloting a Virtual Advisor for Founders
That chatbot-advisor concept is now becoming something founders can actually use. This summer, Georgetown Entrepreneurship is piloting a virtual advisor inside our Summer Launch Incubator — an AI tool designed to give founders 24/7 guidance without replacing the human mentors who remain central to the program.
The tool is built to complement, not compete with, our mentor network. It leans on frameworks our founders already know, like the Mom Test for customer discovery, flagging leading or assumption-laden questions in real time so founders get better answers from the people they’re talking to. It offers guidance across the full range of early startup needs, including formation, market sizing, finance, equity, team, trademarks, and pitching, all tailored to the kinds of ventures coming out of Georgetown. And it’s built with intention: coded in plain language so it’s easy to inspect and update, designed to run with privacy in mind, and grounded explicitly in Georgetown’s Jesuit values, with an emphasis on founder integrity and respect for stakeholders.
Eight summer startups have already put it to work, with mentors helping confirm where it’s used well, letting the AI handle the fundamentals so human mentors can focus their time on the judgment calls that only experience can offer. It’s early, and the goal is iterative: keep refining until the tool is reliable enough to roll out more broadly.
One Summer Launch Incubator founder, Ellie Anderson (C’29), commented, “Ken Wake’s Gship plug-in unlocks AI assistance with values. The most important things when bringing on any co-worker are perspective, values, and vision. Georgetown’s summer launch accelerator program carries that grounding into AI use.”
Startups Built on AI, From Georgetown Out
Ultimately, the clearest evidence of Georgetown Entrepreneurship’s approach to AI isn’t in a classroom or a Zoom call, it’s in the companies our community has produced.
Mercor, co-founded by Georgetown students Brendan Foody and Surya Midha, has become one of the fastest-growing startups in recent memory, reportedly in talks for a valuation as high as $20 billion after crossing a $10 billion valuation less than a year earlier. EdSights is applying AI to student retention and engagement in higher education. Proxy Foods is bringing AI into food and agriculture. The Petition Company is using AI to modernize election technology and civic engagement. And LetsHelp uses AI to make sure no senior gets left behind, pairing aging adults with around-the-clock support.
In reflecting on his experience building his company, Georgetown student Michael Korvyakov (B’27) stated, “I guarantee that the Petition Company would not have existed in the slightest if it hadn’t been for Georgetown Entrepreneurship.”
Different industries and different problems, but each one reflects the same pattern we see across our student ventures: founders who treat AI not as a buzzword, but as core infrastructure for building something real.
Discernment, Not Just Adoption
It would have been easy to treat AI the way most business schools have: as a tool to bolt onto existing courses, a line item in the curriculum, a skill to certify. That’s not the approach we’ve taken, and it turns out we’re not alone in that instinct.
The International Association of Jesuit Universities recently released an updated Inspirational Paradigm for Jesuit Business Education, and its appendix is devoted entirely to what it calls a “discernment on AI.” The framing is deliberate: not a policy handed down from above, but a discernment in common — an ongoing, shared reflection among faculty, staff, and students about how a new technology should serve the aims of the education itself, rather than quietly reshaping those aims to fit the technology.
Read against that framework, the work described above starts to look less like a collection of separate initiatives and more like a single posture, applied consistently.
In Professor Zaman’s classroom, the question the Jesuit paradigm poses directly, is AI assisting with and strengthening the learning process, or replacing it?, is answered by the shape of the assignments themselves. Shipping a feature a week with AI tools speeds up the building; it doesn’t do the founder’s thinking for them.
The Entrepreneurship and AI Salon is, in effect, exactly the discernment-in-common the Jesuit network is calling for, already underway. Rather than issuing rules about AI use from the top, we built a recurring space where the people actually teaching and mentoring founders can work through what’s helping, what’s uncomfortable, and where the lines should sit. That’s slower than a policy memo. It also tends to produce better judgment than a mandate would.
The virtual advisor pilot is our most direct test of the paradigm’s central concern: can AI expand a founder’s capacity for good judgment, or does it risk replacing the harder, slower work that usually happens in a mentor’s office rather than a chat window? Grounding the tool explicitly in Mom Test discipline and Jesuit values, and designing it to complement rather than replace human mentors, is our answer so far, though it’s a question we expect to keep asking as the pilot grows.
And the AI-native ventures coming out of our community raise the same question at the founder level, not just the classroom level. A student building an AI-powered company faces the paradigm’s warning directly: that the benefits of this technology are, so far, accruing disproportionately to those already at the top, while the risks of exclusion and displacement fall elsewhere. We want our founders building with that asymmetry in view, not as a compliance checkbox, but as a live design question for the ventures themselves.
None of this is finished thinking, and that’s the point. The Jesuit paradigm is explicit that a genuine discernment doesn’t arrive at a fixed answer and stop; it’s a posture a community keeps returning to as the technology, and the questions it raises, keep changing.
What’s Next
“Our students were already using these tools before we built anything official,” said Jeff Reid, Founding Director of the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative. “Our job wasn’t to slow that down. It was to make sure they had good mentors, good frameworks, and good judgment in the room with them while they did it.”
AI is now woven into how Georgetown Entrepreneurship works, in coursework, in mentorship, and in the ventures themselves. We expect that to keep growing. More founders will build AI-native companies. Faculty and mentors will keep sharpening their thinking through the Salon series. And if the summer pilot goes well, our virtual advisor could become a standing resource for every founder who comes through our doors.