About us
MYPE Asesor IA is an initiative by researchers focused on entrepreneurship, small business productivity, and the practical application of artificial intelligence, funded by international donors. We're making AI accessible and useful for small businesses. We provide AI-powered coaching and practical AI tools via WhatsApp, helping entrepreneurs improve their businesses while also learning how to leverage AI themselves. Our ongoing research aims to discover the most effective ways to deliver this support.
What users should know
- MYPE Asesor IA's only goal is to help small business owners succeed by providing expert guidance and empowering them with practical AI tools and skills. 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 aim to demystify AI and help you apply it effectively for your specific business needs, directly within the tools you already use, like WhatsApp.
- 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 do this?
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 offers the potential to deliver support that is customized, interactive, timely, and continuous, at a fraction of the cost. It could deliver personalized training and consulting, automate specific tasks, and provide practical tools – scaling valuable assistance to hundreds of millions of small business owners globally.
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 both for advice and for completing specific tasks. 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 many ways this can be done, and it isn't yet clear what works best. Should the focus be on 'hard skills' or on soft skills like personal initiative? What is the right balance between providing expert coaching versus enabling owners with AI tools they can use directly? How can AI best assist with specific operational tasks like marketing content generation or basic financial queries within an accessible interface like WhatsApp? Should support 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 through rigorous testing and direct 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.