Bill Gross bets AI can help mass-produce 1 million new startups and 100 million new jobs

In today’s CEO Daily: Bill Gross is trying to scale himself with AI.

The big leadership story: France on fire

The markets: U.S. investors are buying the AI dip.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune

Good morning. Bill Gross has spent a career trying to scale himself. He launched Idealab in 1996 as a pioneering tech incubator for the internet age that’s so far produced more than 175 companies. Today, he’s launching Idealab.ai, a free public platform that lets users search more than 1.2 million business ideas generated so far, giving people AI-powered tools to test and build them into businesses. The concepts were created through a system that analyzed more than 17 million sources, applying Gross’s 31 methods for generating business ideas that include how he identifies current opportunities such as unmet needs, enablers such as new technologies, and market shifts such as regulatory or cultural changes. He’s also developing a “periodic table of business functions” required to operate a company that can guide users through steps and ultimately create a community where founders can collaborate and find support.

The goal: to help fledgling entrepreneurs create a million new businesses and 100 million new jobs by giving everyone free tools to test their ideas and build them into businesses.

“This is the biggest thing I could do to have the most positive impact on the world,” Gross told me last week. “With Idealab, I could do 10 companies at once; now, I could do 10,000 at once. I feel like this is the ultimate use of AI. What could be better than using it to solve actual world problems?”

If Idealab can get involved in some of the ventures—great, but his main motivation is to spur more global entrepreneurship with ideas and an ecosystem to get things done.

Matthew Prince of Cloudflare has already committed $100,000 in credits to each startup using the platform. As Prince explained to me on Friday, “helping match talented entrepreneurs with vetted business ideas matched to their skill sets seems like a killer way to unlock more entrepreneurship and solve some........

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