Takeaways

• In Dandora, Nairobi, in two thousand and fourteen, three hundred and seventy-two young businesswomen were split into three groups: a university business class, a month of weekly visits to an experienced local businesswoman in the same trade, or nothing. Over the next seventeen months the mentored women earned about twenty percent more profit on average; the class changed habits but not profit. The gain faded as the pairs stopped meeting.
• In two thousand and twenty-three, six hundred and forty Kenyan entrepreneurs joined a trial; half were offered a GPT-four business mentor on WhatsApp. On average, nothing changed. Those already doing well may have gained more than fifteen percent; those doing badly did close to ten percent worse. The difference was which advice they chose to act on: the strugglers took the generic items, like discounts and adverts.
• Something to try: before Friday, find one person who runs the kind of business you want to run, in your own market, and ask one specific question about costs or suppliers. No one to ask? Walk the market, or ask an AI with your specifics and refuse the generic answers.