Mark Cuban tells his own kids they need to learn this AI skill: It’ll help you land ‘jobs left and right’

High school and college students everywhere need to take advantage of a “unique opportunity” that could help them land a job almost anywhere, according to billionaire serial entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban.

Spend “your excess time” learning as much as possible about how to use popular artificial intelligence tools, Cuban advised during an episode of the “TBPN” podcast that aired on Aug. 20. Then, once you’re in the workforce, you’ll be able to help your employer and colleagues — especially those who are struggling to use AI tools and agents effectively — become more efficient and productive, he said.

“You don’t even have to be a software engineer,” Cuban said, adding that he tells his own kids, who are in high school and college: “Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies ... Companies don’t understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage.”

For Cuban, learning about AI means experimenting with the many free tools on the market, he said — developing your skills for prompt engineering and customizing models for specific business scenarios. “Every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI, and that’s what people don’t understand,” said Cuban, adding: “That is going to be jobs left and right.”

There are more than 34 million businesses in the US, and most are small businesses that don’t necessarily have the massive budgets of tech giants to implement AI into their day-to-day business operations. Many of those smaller companies could turn to younger, less expensive hires to implement their AI strategies, Cuban predicted.

Even the the larger companies throwing money at AI tools are still trying to figure out the best ways to implement that new technology into their established business processes, according to a recent EY survey. The results have so far been mixed: 95 per cent of companies had not yet seen any measurable revenue return from their AI investments, according to a July report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers.

The businesses that have had more success implementing AI, so far, are smaller, early-stage startups run by young entrepreneurs capable of customizing AI models to their specific businesses, the MIT report found.

The AI boom reminded Cuban of his own experiences selling software in his 20s, before every company relied on computers in the workplace, he said. “When I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, ‘Well, son, I got this receptionist right there ... I’m never going to need that s--- ever,’” he said.

If Cuban were a teenager again now, he’d start a side hustle helping teach businesses how to use AI effectively, he told CNBC Make It in October 2024. “I would go to businesses, particularly small- to medium-sized businesses that don’t understand AI yet,” he said. “Doesn’t matter if I’m 16, I’d be teaching them as well.”

Cuban isn’t the only one offering similar advice: Use free AI tools at least 10 hours per week, and consider paying for some subscription-based models to constantly refamiliarize yourself with what they do well and what they’re not yet capable of, Wharton professor and AI researcher Ethan Mollick told CNBC on Oct. 7.

Employers “need to ‘crowd’ the best AI users and take ideas from the crowd and turn them into products that people use right away,” Mollick said, adding: “My No. 1 piece of advice is to pay $US20 a month for [Anthropic’s] Claude or [OpenAI’s] GPT or [Google’s] Gemini and use it for everything you can use it for legally.”