“Everyone gets to participate in building the future" – AI Founder, Mahdi Shariff

Welcome to Monday Mornings! A publication about the new world of work beyond the 9-5 — exploring the rise of mass entrepreneurialism. Through sharp analysis and interviews with the builders, thinkers, and leaders driving this shift, Monday Mornings unpacks what a post 9-5 world means for individuals, businesses, and society.

This edition is a Q&A Interview, where an expert guest offers their take on the future of work, along with our signature Monday Marvels and Monday Moanings.

If you’ve been forwarded this email, hello! Subscribe here.

Happy Monday, folks!

This week, I’m back with a Q&A Interview with a founder who wants to redefine how people work will with machines in the future of work.

Meet Mahdi Shariff, serial entrepreneur and today the CEO & Co-Founder of Humble. Recently selected for Google Startups’ AI First Accelerator, Humble is empowering the next-generation of AI Builders. I met Mahdi many years ago and he has always been working on forefront of what’s next.

A self-proclaimed optimist about the opportunities that exist for work in the future thanks to AI, Mahdi joined me to give his take on our question this month: Who gets to build the future?

He shared with me:

• Why AI removes traditional gatekeepers and levels the playing field for professionals and entrepreneurs

• How the AI influencers are making us less educated about AI

• The short term mindset most companies have adopted when it comes to workforce shifts, and why it’ll kill them eventually

Enjoy!

Q: Thanks for joining us, Mahdi! What motivated you to work on Humble’s mission to ‘make the power of computing accessible to everyone’?

A: I find it mad just how powerful technology is, yet that only a tiny group of people (just 0.5% of the world, who are developers) know how to use it. That's points of a percent of people who build everything that the entire world consumes.

It's almost like we're living in the dark ages where a tiny privileged elite know how to read and write. If we think about all of the movies and books and content we consume today, it's only possible because we have literacy at scale.

Our motivation with Humble has been to see a democratisation of who has the ability to build and also to control their own technology applications. To no longer just be at the hands of some large corporation. This has a big social impact piece for us. If you can give people power (literally) when it comes to technology, then they can shape the world in a really material way. People get to create, not just consume, and control their own destiny. This is different from my last startup, where we found a use case (personal CRM) but lacked the scale or social impact agenda that we wanted.

Q: If you’re successful in this mission, what will the tangible implications be?

A: Right now, if you've got a tech issue or want to build a digital product, you have to rely on someone else. You’ll hire a developer or agency to build that thing for you. This cost barrier means that you aren’t going to solve a load of the problems that you face every day. So when you think about that from a social inequality perspective, then only the people with the resources can afford that have their problem solved. Everyone else is left behind.