Wielding AI to Help the World: A Tale of Two Teen Entrepreneurs

At this year’s ASU+GSV event, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) hosted an insightful 20-minute panel showcasing teens who are using AI in entrepreneurial ways to find solutions to social challenges. Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE)'s CEO J.D. LaRock, J.D., Ed.D. was joined by NFTE students and young entrepreneurs Saket Pathak (16), and Pratham Muriki (17). Saket’s company–inclusifyIQ–is focused on fairness in the employment space; and Pratham’s company–SamariAID– is focused on public health and medical crisis response. Here’s a glimpse into how these teens have brought entrepreneurial ideas to life using AI, and why they care.?

Saket’s story - What he’s up to:?

“My business is a comprehensive platform that focuses on the inclusion aspects of organizations, like companies or schools. So, our users would be students and employees. The AI tools inclusiveIQ uses are meant to help identify inclusion issues happening in organizations and offer recommendations and strategies to mitigate them. Here’s an example: let’s say you were an organization conducting an interview for a new candidate and you’re writing to your boss about how the interview went. You might write something like, “John was a good candidate for someone from that background,” but that sounds like unconscious bias. So, the inclusifyIQ bias detection algorithm would be able to identify that the statement doesn’t sound right and give a recommendation to fix it.”?

Saket’s story - Why he cares:?

“The inspiration came from examples I was seeing all around me of lack of inclusion. There’s a student at my school who uses a wheelchair who was not being included in activities that he could have been doing. Or, my aunt who is in the software engineering field, who has equal experience with her co-workers, was telling me that she is always being overshadowed because she’s a woman of color in STEM– this resulted in some mental health issues for her. So, I realized that, today, the traditional ways to help with inclusion–like courses and training programs– they only go so far and they’re not measurable. inclusiveIQ is trying to use AI technology to help measure inclusion to make sure it works in real-world settings.”?

Saket’s story – How he got into AI:?

So my own background with AI started during the pandemic. I was just a bored kid with not much to do during lockdown. And at that time AI hype was growing and I was seeing these different talks and courses about how AI could revolutionize different fields. I realized AI is going to be big and it’s going to be able to impact a lot of different fields.? I’m interested in how it’s able to learn by itself and train itself in ways that humans don’t exactly know yet. I think that’s something really powerful.”?

Pratham’s story - What he’s up to:?

“SamariAID is an AI-based mobile application that provides universal first aid access by first identifying the wound, and then providing step-by-step symbols-based instructions the user can use to stabilize the wound. With SamariAID, our goal is for the user to open the application and scan their wound. After scanning it, SamariAID uses its extensive database to recognize specific clinical features like the color, shape, blood, type of tissue, and more. Using those features we can identify the exact first aid wound the user has and provide personalized instructions based on that. To get those instructions, we’re gathering a lot of data from reputable sources like Mayo Clinic, which a user can clearly understand, and send that to the user so the user can stabilize themself or someone else.”?

Pratham’s story - Why he cares:?

This all started when my team and I came across a statistic showing that around 150,000 people die in pre-hospital deaths each year because of a lack of first-aid knowledge. We knew there was a lack of access to first aid, but this is an old problem that there’s no technology solving. So we wanted to turn to AI hoping we can use the AIS capabilities to bridge the gap between people with first aid training and those without it. Our whole goal is to help people stabilize their wounds and keep them alive until they get to the hospital. We aim to provide the first aid knowledge they need to keep going until the paramedics arrive.”??

Pratham’s story - How he got into AI:?

“I didn’t know too much about AI beforehand, but I knew that this was a new technology. I genuinely think AI will benefit the education sector a lot–like computers did when they were first used. There’s a lot of backlash about how people can cheat and so on, but at the end of the day, AI can make education much simpler and I think it has the power to completely revolutionize the education sector by 2030.”