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By Mandy Taheri
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Entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Emma Grede have a simple message for anyone still on the AI sidelines: embrace it, make it part of your everyday life, and never stop learning.
The two, who appeared as investors together for two seasons of ABC's Shark Tank, spoke to Newsweek at the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow: AI in Action Lab in New York City in late February, sharing their insights on what it will take to stay competitive in the AI era and what the technology won’t replace.
Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Cost Plus Drugs, compared the current anxiety around AI to the early fears surrounding personal computers and emerging technologies. "There was a time when people were just terrified of PCs," he said. "People were like, oh my God, it's going to replace everything."
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AI, he argued, is no different, but rather a tool to test and learn from, not fear, and argued that anyone, from students to business leaders, who does so will be more likely to adapt and succeed.
Neither entrepreneur believes AI will replace everything, and certainly not necessary human leadership attributes. Grede, CEO of Good American and founding partner of SKIMS, said the technology might "catapult and accelerate whatever it is that you're doing," but added that "there's no replacement for great innovation."
Cuban added, "AI is not gonna make you creative, but it'll allow creative people to iterate faster so they can do more and be more creative."
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AI Literacy
Cuban's prescription for building AI fluency is three things: create an agent, be "willing to try new things all the time," and "practice ways to use it so it becomes natural."
“ There's always gonna be a natural hesitancy or fear, but as more people use it, all of a sudden you're gonna find yourself going, 'OK, why am I not using it?' So better to just get ahead of it,” he added.
Grede said she knows the feeling of being overwhelmed by AI, but noted that it's not a reason to watch it pass by.
"The point is there's nothing to it but to do it," she told Newsweek, describing how she used AI to build herself a 30-day learning plan at the start. "I don't think being overwhelmed is the way to learn anything. You gotta let your curiosity take over."
In the classroom, Grede stressed that students and teachers need to take it upon themselves to learn AI and figure out how to best optimize it to “make that the thread through everything that you’re doing.”
Both Cuban and Grede serve as the first official ambassadors for Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow, a program that aims to close the education and opportunity gap by connecting public school students with STEM learning, mentorship and hands-on problem-solving experience. Samsung partnered with the Mark Cuban Foundation, a philanthropic organization that offers free AI bootcamps to provide additional free AI training resources to teachers nationwide.
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Allison Stransky, chief marketing officer of Samsung Electronics America, told Newsweek, “AI literacy today is more than understanding technology—it’s about empowering students with the creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills they need to navigate and shape the world around them.”
Cuban said AI literacy should be mandatory for teachers, warning that without it "it creates a disconnect," while Grede called the technology a potential "huge unlock for teachers,” one that could automate routine tasks and free educators to spend more time getting to know their students.
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AI on Mentorship
For all their enthusiasm about AI, both Cuban and Grede were clear that the technology is no substitute for a human mentor.
"AI is not smart, it's probabilistic. It learns from what it's been trained on, but it can't actually think," Cuban said, noting that, unlike humans, it doesn’t understand context or consequences. Human mentors, he added, remain essential precisely because they can navigate nuance in ways AI cannot.
Grede, who has been vocal about the importance of mentorship, said, "So much of what I do as a mentor is give really tough, hard, honest, nuanced feedback, and AI is a little bit too nice."
She continued, ”if we're really honest, like the point of mentorship isn't just showing someone what they're doing well, it's really being that honest piece of feedback and giving the tough love part of it sometimes, and that's not what you're gonna get from it [AI].”
When asked about how to mentor people on jobs that may not even exist yet, the business gurus emphasized that certain skills and attributes remain despite AI advances.
“ You've gotta take experience and couple it with flexibility and this piece of curiosity, and I don't think that any of that is replaceable,” Grede said. Cuban added, "things evolve, and that's where you need people who can understand all the nuanced differences."
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