Anna Burgess Yang is, among other things, the author of the newsletter “Work Better”, which deals with the future of work and professional reorientation. She has been self-employed for several years – and openly admits to using AI at many points in her work. Nevertheless, she sees clear limits with tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. This is particularly true with regard to interpersonal relationships and creative processes. If these limits were exceeded, the use of AI in self-employment could actually do more harm than good.
AI makes it easier to start your own business
More and more young people are taking the step into self-employment. According to a study by the development bank KfW, 40 percent of founders in Germany were under 30 years old last year. The average age was 34.2 years – a new low. For comparison: at the beginning of the millennium, the average age was 37 to 38 years. In 2005, only 24 percent of founders were under 30 years old. According to a survey by the personnel service provider Randstad, the average age of German founders could fall even further: Seven percent of Gen Z say they are already self-employed – and a further 16 percent would also like to pursue this career path.
AI can make it much easier to become self-employed today. Smart tools help, among other things, to write invoices, develop new ideas or create content for social media. This is particularly relevant for solopreneurs who have to take on multiple business-critical roles at the same time. Nevertheless, there are limits, says Burgess Yang – and it’s not just because even the best AI models are still prone to hallucinations. She also uses AI for a variety of tasks. “But I have also drawn clear boundaries about what AI can and cannot do in my work,” she writes in her guest article for Fast Company.
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Where humanity continues to matter
“My clients hire me to do specific tasks based largely on the reputation I have built over the years. They rely on my skills and, in some cases, the research I conduct,” says Burgess Yang. “There is an important difference between AI-assisted and AI-generated work. AI-assisted means that you use AI to speed up a process that remains under human supervision – for example, creating a draft that you then revise, or compiling research that you review. AI-generated means that there is no human involved in the process. The former can save you real time, while the latter introduces risks that affect your relationships with clients and yours can damage reputation.”
For Burgess Yang, AI is an amalgamation of existing elements – it synthesizes, summarizes and recombines, but cannot create anything of its own. “If your business relies on copywriting, design, strategy, or any form of creativity, AI cannot replace the thinking that makes your work your own,” she writes. This also applies to interpersonal contact. Customers and contacts on platforms like Linkedin would immediately recognize the difference between a real and an AI-generated interaction. Although AI can speed up the writing of comments or emails, since the aim is to build trust, AI-generated text could undermine exactly that. Her advice to sole proprietors is therefore: “The starting material is always you. AI just helps you get more out of it.”
