How AI is reimagining mentorship for small business owners
December 10, 2024 | By Vicki Hyman
Christen Nino De Guzman is an influencer’s influencer. She’s worked for Pinterest, Instagram and most recently TikTok, helping companies partner with creators in pursuit of viral videos and campaigns with buzz. She’s also built up a personal brand offering career advice, with her videos garnering millions of views.
As an insider, she’s seen how the growth of social media platforms, particularly TikTok, has democratized the creator economy. Where these platforms were once dominated by wannabe lifestyle mavens with high-end camera equipment and a fleet of assistants, now dental hygienists, bartenders and high school students with authentic voices and relatable tales can find fame. But not, it turns out, always fortune.
“I worked on hundreds of sponsored campaigns, and no matter what type of campaign I was working on, I would see really big — extreme — pay disparity,” Nino De Guzman says. One influencer might get paid $2,000 while another with a similar following might get $20,000 for comparable content. “A lot of the creators didn’t know how to price or negotiate their content because it was such a new industry. There’s no minimum wage. There’s no baseline.”
So in 2022 she launched Clara for Creators to increase pay transparency among influencers and make the creator economy more equitable. More than 34,000 creators use the platform to negotiate fair rates and share their experiences — crowdsourcing as a form of mentorship for the digital age.
“How do I price my content? How can I get paid faster? You can negotiate. You can ask for more money,” Nino De Guzman says. “These are all things that you should feel empowered to do.”
That’s why she was excited to partner with Mastercard on its new generative AI chatbot tool called Mastercard Small Business AI, which democratizes mentorship by delivering tailored assistance to small business owners no matter their field or where they are on their entrepreneurial journey. More than nine out of 10 small and medium-size business owners believe that mentoring improves their chances of success, yet only 25% have a mentor, according to a 2024 U.S. Small Business Administration survey.
Anonymized pay equity data from Clara for Creators as well as Nino De Guzman’s own insights help inform the tool, but it’s built for any entrepreneur and their individual needs. The tool is designed to be a mentor, providing tailored guidance to help entrepreneurs move seamlessly from ideation to sustaining and growing their business, empowering them to take the next step toward success. That might include advice from generating business names and navigating copyrights to accessing startup capital or grants to boosting their financial know-how to understanding hiring strategies and franchise opportunities.
“AI can’t replace the power of human connection, but we believe it can be an exceptional catalyst for knowledge that can help entrepreneurs reach their fullest potential,” says Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer. His team developed the tool with Create Labs Ventures, a social enterprise focused on expanding tech access to underserved communities.
In addition to Clara for Creators, Mastercard also worked with media organizations, including Blavity, Group Black, Newsweek and Televisa Univision, to train the AI with inclusive content.
Currently being piloted through Mastercard.com in the U.S., the AI tool is part of the company’s commitment to small business growth, which included a pledge, recently met, to connect 50 million small businesses to the digital economy. The company recently launched Mastercard Biz360, a one-stop shop to streamline access to the business management tools small and medium-size businesses need, adding it to a growing list of small business programs.
“Creators and small business owners don’t have huge teams most of the time, so if we can lean into an AI tool like this and get the answers that we need and reduce the amount of work that we have to outsource, that’s incredibly helpful to us,” Nino De Guzman says. “One-to-one sharing, it’s not always feasible. Versus having to respond to 10 DMs on Instagram, the idea of being able to knowledge-share more widely on a greater scale is really exciting for me.”
Photo credit: Alexsey Reyes
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