Major companies aren’t the only ones jumping on the artificial intelligence bandwagon. Local high schooler Dean Parsons is launching an AI business of his own, and he says we can expect many of his generation to do the same.
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Major companies aren’t the only ones jumping on the artificial intelligence bandwagon. Local high schooler Dean Parsons is launching an AI business of his own, and he says we can expect many of his generation to do the same.
Parsons, a grade 11 student at Colonel By Secondary School, has long had a passion for technology and software. He starting coding his own video games in middle school using the free programming language Scratch, eventually moving on to game engine Unity and learning C#.
“C# is decently close to the languages I use now, so it transferred really well,” he told OBJ in an interview on Monday. “From there, from these communities, I learned about software. I learned that video games are for entertainment, but I realized that the software I make can be for entertainment or to help people, and that seemed to be a much more rewarding thing to get into.”
Most recently, for Parsons and his peers, artificial intelligence has emerged as a new, and potentially valuable, frontier.
“I’ve made a lot of friends in the (software) space and a lot of them are always saying, listen, if you want to get into SaaS (software as a service), what you really have to do is get into AI,” he said. “It’s a huge thing. The wave is now and you might as well get in on it now. I started learning from there.”
An extensive job search last summer led him to come up with the idea for his first AI business, LetterLabsAI, which he’s since launched with the help of Invest Ottawa’s Summer Company Program, which provides mentorship and grants for entrepreneurs in their teens and twenties.
“I realized that the cover letter was kind of the hardest part for me personally,” he said of applying for jobs. “The cover letter actually has some personality to it. So I thought, maybe AI could help.”
The platform allows job seekers to upload a PDF of their cover letter, which is then analyzed by AI on structure, grammar, and other strengths and weaknesses. The app then returns a handful of feedback points for each category, so users can learn more about potential issues and how to fix them. Users can then make the changes themselves, or ask AI to do it for them.
Parsons said the result is a higher-quality cover letter that stands out to recruiters, while retaining the user’s voice.
It’s a unique approach compared to the AI programs already available to job seekers, like cover letter generators, and one Parsons believes better utilizes the strengths of ChatGPT.
“AI is really good at understanding and explaining, but it’s really bad at producing,” he said. “When you ask it to write something, it’s very robotic and emotionless because it’s a robot. That’s where I realized maybe writing the cover letter isn’t what I needed from it. I needed someone to go over the cover letter, like an audit.”
It’s a concept that received support from his mentor at Invest Ottawa, who encouraged and helped streamline the idea and how to turn it into a business.
An early version of the program is already online, but Parsons said he’s in the middle of creating a new version with updated user interface, new features, and some premium elements that users can pay to unlock. Parsons will also be receiving a grant to support the project, which he said will go toward covering the costs of running the program, as well as targeted advertising and other marketing efforts.
