Mark Cuban has this advice for new graduates: Go for a small business.
In a post on X on Wednesday, the billionaire investor and former “Shark Tank” star said new graduates should look for jobs at small businesses because that's where they can add the most value.
Cuban said new graduates can teach small businesses “how to use agents to optimize processes that they don't have the time or the luxury to do manually.”
“Big companies don't need new graduates for this,” he says. “Entrepreneurial companies will love the value you add.”
He believes that job seekers will be able to There, new graduates can add “immediate value in ways that companies didn't need.”
An AI agent is a virtual assistant that can autonomously complete a task from start to finish without requiring user prompts.
Companies are doubling their hiring of AI agents this year. According to a survey of more than 400 companies by software engineering management service Jellyfish, agent AI adoption rates among these companies rose from 50% in December 2024 to 82% in May.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in January that “the age of agent AI has arrived,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman likened AI agents to junior employees.
Morgan Stanley said in a November note that it expects AI shopping agents to add $115 billion to the U.S. e-commerce industry by 2030.
Mr. Cuban's comments come at a difficult time for recent graduates trying to enter a market with few job openings.
Handshake, a California-based recruitment agency, reported in May that job listings on its platform were down 15% year-over-year, while the number of applications per job was up 30%.
According to Handshake, more than a third of full-time job applications received from recent graduates were applied to companies with fewer than 250 employees.
And small businesses are using their work-from-home values to attract Gen Z graduates. Workplace researchers told Business Insider in July that these companies offer flexible work arrangements to compete with larger companies for top talent.
