Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform their competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI was not the answer, in and of itself, but is meant to serve as an aid that can help entrepreneurs by making it easier to get started growing their businesses and answering questions along the way.

Cuban suggested that today’s entrepreneurs should spend “every waking minute learning about AI,” because of its potential.

“There’s so much changing that rapidly,” he said, adding that it’s different for established businesses integrating AI compared with new businesses just getting off the ground.

“It’s so much easier to start,” Cuban explained. “It went from — way, way back in the day — $5,000 for a PC…to if you just have a laptop and a connection to the internet, you can start anything,” he continued. “Now, you have a mentor — whether you use Perplexity, Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — it doesn’t matter. You have experts.”

While he admitted that there were some problems with AIs that make mistakes and hallucinate, Cuban noted that human mentors and experts “don’t always get it right either.”

Despite the issues, the AI “experts” can help you understand what you don’t know, and can aid in other areas of running a business, like research, emails, and sales calls.

However, Cuban cautioned the crowd not to overly rely on AI.

“AI is never the answer. AI is the tool. Whatever skills you have, you can use AI to amplify them,” he said.

This is particularly true in creative fields, where AI is moving into areas like art and writing.

“A lot of creative people think, well, AI is gonna write all the scripts,” Cuban noted, adding. “AI doesn’t know a good story from a bad story. You need to be creative. AI can do the video — trust me, I can create AI-generated videos. They’re still gonna suck,” he said.

“Whatever skills you have, AI can amplify them. But not using it means somebody else is going to be amplifying their skills — and that could be the difference between getting ahead of you or not,” Cuban said.