Ain Center
Practice the reasoning behind a decision.
Explore
Begin with a business scenario or venture idea.
Choose
Make assumptions and tradeoffs explicit.
Reflect
Use AI feedback to question the reasoning.
Validate
Turn an exercise into questions for real discovery.
Synthetic personas and simulated interviews can sharpen a hypothesis. Evidence of demand must come from real people.
Illustrated from this case study. Examples are synthetic and contain no customer data.
The short version
The full story
Founders and students need ways to practice decisions before those decisions become expensive. At the Ain Center for Entrepreneurship, I worked on AI tools that make that practice more accessible.
VentureForge
VentureForge uses business scenarios to help users work through strategy choices. The goal is to make the reasoning visible: which assumptions support a decision, what tradeoffs it creates and what the user might have overlooked.
AI feedback gives the user another perspective to examine. It should invite reflection and challenge an assumption, rather than turn a generated score into an authority.
Venture exploration
I also worked on tools for exploring ideas through structured scoring, generated personas and simulated interviews. These can help a founder identify questions worth investigating.
The distinction matters: a simulated customer is synthetic. Its response does not establish demand or replace an interview with a real person. The useful output is a better hypothesis and a plan to test it.
My contribution
As Graduate AI Product Lead, I worked across scope, design, build, onboarding and rollout while completing my master’s. I connected the educational use case to an experience students and founders could navigate themselves.
What I learned
A self-serve tool needs more than a working model. Users need to understand what to enter, how to interpret the result and where its limits are. Those explanations are part of the product.