Early-stage founders use AI to save time, build smarter — and dream bigger
Artificial intelligence may not replace human founders anytime soon. Instead, with the right tools, AI can be a founder's best friend.
That was the message from the 'AI Tools for Entrepreneurs and Early-Stage Teams' panel at the 2025 Technical.ly Builders Conference. Moderated by Intake Media founder (and former Technical.ly editor) Stephen Babcock, the panel featured Laneisha Roberts, cofounder of the Atlanta-based performance evaluation platform ReviewTailor, and Ashwin Jaiprakash, founder of the DC-headquartered go-to-market intelligence company Eazy.
The speakers shared how they're already leveraging AI in their startups — and what kinds of tools they wish existed to help founders like them, and the others in the room, juggle the endless demands of building something new from scratch.
'We're learning to use these tools still,' Babcock said. 'We're the early users today.'
Roberts, who previously spent 15 years in government, healthcare and corporate leadership, started ReviewTailor to solve a specific pain point: performance reviews that eat up time, perpetuate bias and rarely reflect employees' real contributions.
She recalled one manager who flagged emails, had Word docs and relied on memory to write reviews. That discovery, she said, made it clear AI had the potential to streamline the process.
Jaiprakash, whose background includes years in enterprise tech consulting, founded Eazy to support IT services firms as they assist clients in modernizing their data infrastructure. By using AI to analyze patterns in sales and client needs, Eazy helps reduce the failure rate of digital transformation projects — an issue Jaiprakash said affects 70% of large-scale efforts.
'If you can improve people's experience in the way that they interact with other people, and AI is just the mechanism to do that, let's do that,' Jaiprakash said.
Founder favorites: Tactical AI tools and wishes for the future
Beyond their own products, the panelists also shared their go-to tools and hacks for using AI in their everyday work:
ChatGPT remains a daily go-to for Roberts, who uses it for everything from analyzing survey results to drafting content. 'ChatGPT is my employee of the week every week,' she joked.
OpusClip was a crowd favorite. This tool breaks down long videos into bite-sized clips and ranks them by their potential virality for social media. Roberts said the free version makes 20-30 clips from a 45-minute video.
Supademo helps Roberts create interactive onboarding and demo videos tailored to the employee's role.
Magic Patterns, recommended by Jaiprakash, auto-generates UI interfaces and design elements, helping teams create faster mockups or chat-based interfaces without needing a designer.
AskHumans, a voice-based survey tool, allows founders to send personalized questions and receive spoken feedback. 'We found that when people speak, you capture 35% or 40% more context,' Jaiprakash said, adding that this richer feedback is vital for effective discovery.
Asked what AI tool they wished existed, the panelists had no shortage of ideas.
Roberts proposed a 'cofounder whisperer' — an AI that could monitor team communication and flag early signs of burnout or interpersonal tension.
'I don't know if there's any investors in the room, but that would also be valuable for investing in early-stage startups, where those issues tend to surface up,' she said.
Jaiprakash dreamed of a tool that scans a founder's network and proactively recommends who to contact for help solving a specific problem. He imagined an AI that would tell him the people he should be reaching out to, 'and schedule a call for me with them tomorrow.'
Panelists agreed that the real promise of AI lies in speeding up feedback loops and decision-making, not skipping foundational work.
'You need to know to the very minuscule level what the manual process is,' Jaiprakash said, adding: 'I don't think you can build something effectively if you haven't gone through the pain of doing that manual work.'
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