That question emerged throughout the July 31 session of Georgetown Entrepreneurship’s Entrepreneurship and AI Salon Series, featuring Georgetown alumna and Realworld founder Genevieve Bellaire (MBA ‘15, JD ‘15). The monthly series brings together Georgetown faculty, mentors and members of the entrepreneurial community to examine how artificial intelligence is changing not only the way companies operate, but also how entrepreneurship should be taught and advised.

Bellaire offered a unique perspective because she has experienced both sides of that transformation. With a background in law, business and finance, Bellaire founded Realworld to address a problem she encountered in her own life: how overwhelming it can be to navigate the responsibilities of adulthood. Today, Realworld is an AI-powered management platform that brings finances, important documents and reminders into one place, making it easier to manage the complexities of everyday life.

Building her vision, however, required something that Bellaire did not have, extensive technical expertise. “The number one hardest thing for me was to find and hire and pay technical talent,” Bellaire recalled. Looking back, she estimated that many of the years she spent focused on fundraising was only to secure the resources needed to hire engineers to build her product. AI has radically changed this. 

“The last 18 months have been by far the most exciting because of AI,” Bellaire said. At its largest, Realworld had 15 employees, with about 80 percent of the team working in product or engineering. Today, the company operates with a team of five and is focused much more heavily on marketing and partnerships. 

Beyond creating more flexibility for her team, in the past year, Realworld has been able to build a suite of products that previously required years of research, development and testing with only two contracted engineers. Despite not having a technical background herself, Bellaire has been able to become directly involved in the process. “You, every single person on this call, could go build a company today, even if it was highly technical,” Bellaire told participants. 

The greatest implication of AI for entrepreneurs is the accessibility that it creates. The traditional path from idea to product often required founders to find a technical co-founder, raise capital, hire a team and spend years building. AI is shrinking that timeline. 

For Bellaire, the most important result is the ability to reach product-market fit faster. Founders can create something in minutes, put it in front of users, receive feedback, and immediately begin iterating. Instead of having to place all their resources behind a single idea, entrepreneurs can take what Bellaire called “multiple shots on goal,” experimenting with different products before deciding where to invest their time and energy. 

However, easier building introduces a new challenge. If you can build something quickly, so can everyone else. When asked how Realworld maintains an advantage when competitors have access to the same technology, Bellaire responded, “product is no longer, like, the moat.” Instead, she pointed to “brand, community, trust, [and] marketing” as important sources of differentiation.

For educators and mentors, the changes brought by AI raise another question. How should entrepreneurship be taught when experimentation is becoming so accessible? Bellaire described AI as a “24-7, very knowledgeable tutor” that allowed her to teach herself the technical concepts that she once needed the help of others to understand. She argued that because AI has reduced the time, money and opportunity cost required to test an idea, entrepreneurship should no longer be reserved for people who make it their full time job. “Everyone can and, frankly, should be entrepreneurs,” she said. 

AI may make starting easier but it does not guarantee that what gets built will succeed. As technical barriers fall and products become easier to build and replicate, the qualities that AI cannot easily reproduce such as understanding customers, building trust and creating a strong brand and community become even more important.