Idealab's Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Business Ideas

Bill Gross, founder and CEO of Idealab and ProRata, has released 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas to the public for free. The move is his answer to a question the industry has so far left largely unanswered: if AI eliminates jobs at scale, what replaces them?

The timing is not accidental. Bloomberg reported this week that U.K. banks are cutting back-office jobs, partly due to AI. Anthropic's own hiring data shows the same pattern inside one of the fastest-growing AI companies. Junior technical hires have fallen from 27% of all new hires in early 2025 to 9% today, and the company is hiring far fewer administrative staff than its growth rate would normally demand. If other companies follow, the economy will carry significantly fewer entry-level jobs.

Gross argues that AI could also supercharge entrepreneurship, partly offsetting those losses.

How do you generate 1.2 million ideas?

Idealab, founded in 1996, was one of the first startup incubators and has spawned roughly 175 companies. Over the years, Gross developed 31 techniques he calls "methodologies" for generating business ideas. These fall into three categories:

• Opportunities: solving a business pain point, removing friction, waste or danger, improving design.
• Enablers: new technologies, scientific advances, new materials, processes, or shifting cost curves.
• Shifts: regulatory changes and behavioral, economic, cultural or geopolitical movements that make timing right.

Gross fed those methodologies into an AI model along with some 17 million source documents — news stories, research reports, expired patents, public company filings and online community discussions. The output: more than 1.2 million business ideas, now available at idealab.ai.

"I've always wanted to have a positive impact with Idealab by starting many companies, but I can't start 1.2 million," Gross said. "But what about if I can empower entrepreneurship around the world way more than I've been able to do in Pasadena?"

Users can query the ideas by industry, skills, interests and geography, upload a resume or LinkedIn profile for personalized suggestions, or submit an existing business plan for refinement or 100 neighboring ideas.

What does it mean for trapped corporate IP?

Gross sees a second market: large organizations sitting on unused patents. He tested the system on Caltech's patent base of 9,978 patents and said it generated some 3,450 potential new businesses. He said 3M's roughly 21,000 patents yielded 1,549 new business ideas.

"I'm really hoping that this will not only help entrepreneurs do things, but help big companies do things too," Gross said. No figure was given for how many of these machine-generated businesses would survive contact with real markets.

Can AI really create 100 million jobs?

Gross's stated goal is that idealab.ai will catalyze 1 million new businesses and 100 million new jobs — enough to offset the 100 million jobs Goldman Sachs once forecast AI could eliminate from existing companies by 2030. So far, there is little sign the job picture will be as bleak as Goldman suggested.

"These would be 100 million jobs that are much, much better than the 100 million jobs that were displaced, giving people more purpose and more excitement and more enthusiasm and more passion, and actually solving world problems," Gross said. That claim, it should be noted, rests on no evidence yet — none of these businesses exist.

The model provides a roll-out plan for each idea. Entrepreneurs needing capital can approach Idealab, which will consider investing. And Gross has built what he calls a "Periodic Table of Business Functions" charting 118 jobs — from customer discovery to sales to operations and legal — with an agentic AI environment to automate them. Unlike the ideas, that service is paid, launches in 2027, and has no disclosed pricing. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has donated $100,000 worth of Cloudflare credits to any startup building on the platform.

There is some supporting context. U.S. new business formation is near all-time highs, up roughly 11% since the pandemic ended in 2022, according to Census Bureau data, with similar patterns elsewhere. Whether AI-driven idea generation can convert that momentum into a measurable jobs counterweight remains unproven — but the free release at idealab.ai now lets anyone test the thesis themselves.