About us
MYPE Asesor IA is an initiative of researchers on entrepreneurial training and small business productivity, and funded by international donors. We're making these tools to help small businesses benefit from AI, and to figure out how to make it most useful for them.
What users should know
- MYPE Asesor IA's only goal is to help small business owners succeed. It is not engagement (to sell advertising), its not to collect data (users need not provide any data about themselves), and its not to sell users anything.
- We believe in full transparency. Whenever you use an AI-based product, there is a layer of instructions and resources that guide what you will see and here. We publish all these details on our blog. You can see exactly how the tool is instructed, so you know what it is (and more importantly, isn't) trying to do.
- We are building a public good, and are keen to both be copied by and collaborate with others working in this area.
- How is it free? Model inference and the WhatsApp Business API have costs. These costs are funded by international donors who share the mission of enhancing small business productivity in developing countries, and share our committment to full transparency.
Why work on (and fund) this effort?
Two of Innovation for Poverty Action's 14 'Best Bets' to improve the lives of people living in poverty are training and consulting services for micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries. McKenzie & Woodruff's meta-analysis shows that training improves MSME performance, with the impact of consulting services particularly large. But human-led training and consulting programs are very expensive and difficult to scale. "There is a need for further experimentation with alternative delivery methods, particularly online training".
Generative AI could be used to deliver training and consulting that is customized to the entrepreneur's priorities, interactive, timely, and continuous, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. It could be scaled to hundreds of millions of small business owners around the world.
But it isn't as simple as just giving MSMEs ChatGPT. We need an accessible 'on-ramp' for entrepreneurs who have limited comfort with technology in general, let alone interacting with LLMs. We need to guide the models towards an interaction with the users that is valuable to them, and augment those models with the best materials available.
There are a ways this can be done, and it isn't clear what will work best. Should the training focus on 'hard skills' or on soft skills like personal initiative? Should the tool provide detailed guidance, or act more as a sounding board for the owner's own ideas? Should it focus on immediate action towards quick wins, or longer-term goal setting? What is the right 'dosage'- daily chats, weekly check-ins? The best way to figure this out is though testing and user feedback.
Project Team
This work is being led by Bailey Klinger (bio available here) and Piero Ghezzi (bio available here), as part of Hacer Peru's AI & MSME Productivity Initiative.
CC0 Public Domain Dedication
We at MYPE AsesorIA hereby dedicate our intellectual property, including all code, documentation, and related material, to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors.
We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to our intellectual property under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute, and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, without asking for permission. However, we offer the work as-is and make no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence or absence of errors, whether or not discoverable.