Travis Di Lombardi-Spicer quit his audio producing job on the spot after getting passed up for a raise in January 2025. The 30-year-old felt artificial intelligence could eventually eliminate his job, and he wanted to do something proactive instead of pocketing his roughly $75,000 a year, from full-time work and freelance projects, and waiting for the end to come, he says.
Skeptical he’d find stability in an uncertain job market, Spicer turned to entrepreneurship. He spent $40,000 — selling some personal assets and pulling money from his 401(k) and savings — to launch the beta version of Spotbookr, his AI-powered consumer spending and advertising analytics business, in May 2025, he says.
Entrepreneurs in the U.S. filed 1.56 million business applications from November through January, the most of any three-month period since at least 2004, according to a CNBC Make It analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. To an extent, the rise is predictable — when people struggle to find jobs, particularly against the backdrop of a stagnant job market or mass layoffs, they’re more likely to start businesses.
This crop of entrepreneurs is different: Anticipating future layoffs, some Americans are leaving their jobs preemptively to start businesses. Many of them say AI makes launching a startup easier. Others say they’re leaving on their own terms before suffering AI-related job cuts. Spicer became an example of both after experimenting with the technology himself, he says.
“Budgets [for audio projects] started getting lower and lower and lower,” says Spicer. “I just wanted to be in control.”
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Entrepreneurship is notoriously risky. Roughly a quarter of new U.S. businesses don’t survive their first year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But workers are also wary of the risks threatening typical 9-to-5 roles, with future-of-work reports and big-name CEOs predicting widespread workforce changes.
In a Resume Now poll from December of 1,012 employed U.S. adults, four in 10 workers said AI was already “replacing, devaluating, or overlapping” with elements of their job, and 29% said it could effectively do at least half of their daily responsibilities.
When you add geopolitical instability, rising costs of living and an erosion of trust between employers and employees, working Americans face a perfect storm of unpredictability, says Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the entrepreneurship hub at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The result is a record number of Americans seeking greater control over their careers, income and time, he says.
“The opportunity cost [of starting a business] is lower right now, just because the alternatives in the labor market are not as strong,” says Chaudhuri.
Some workers sense an AI threat — and want to quit while they’re ahead
Five years into Michelle Yeung’s software engineering career at a large national media outlet, she felt unfulfilled and unhappy, she says. She made enough money — $250,000 per year, including bonuses — but the more advanced AI became, the more she could see it eventually replacing her, she says. She felt purposeless, she adds.
“I wasn’t really pushing myself. I wasn’t satisfied with how much I was growing or doing,” says Yeung, 29. Other factors beyond AI played into her job dissatisfaction, she notes. Still, “I wanted to go from giving, like, 20% of myself to giving 200% to something,” she says.
Yeung left her job in early 2025 and used her savings to open Matcha House, a cafe in New York’s East Village, that July, she says. “I just love physically being able to make something and then hand it to someone [and] building relationships with my customers,” she says.
Yeung and Spicer say they don’t take salaries from their new businesses yet. Instead, they’ve made lifestyle sacrifices, they say: Spicer’s girlfriend now shoulders the couple’s expenses, and Yeung moved into a cheaper apartment with a new roommate to cut costs.
Travis Di Lombardi-Spicer has another partially AI-powered business using the same predictive modeling as Spotbookr, he says.
Travis Di Lombardi-Spicer
Both currently prefer the uncertainty of entrepreneurship to their former roles, they say. Headlines about companies like Amazon, Salesforce and Block — which cited AI while cumulatively laying off tens of thousands of employees over the past year — partially fueled Spicer’s decision to leave his previous career, he says.
Corporate employment is less stable than it used to be, feeding some people’s inclinations to strike out on their own, says Todd McCracken, president and CEO of the National Small Business Association, an advocacy group. The U.S. added 116,000 jobs in 2025, down from 1.46 million in 2024. Job cuts announced in January reached their highest monthly level at the start of a year since 2009, according to data from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“In terms of national culture, I think there’s been this drift away from large, bureaucratic institutions into entrepreneurship and startup culture,” McCracken says.
Some entrepreneurs say AI can help ‘fill in the gaps’ of their skill sets
The technology can help create basic websites or business plans, no prior expertise required, he says. In some contexts, it can handle basic, fundamental tasks — often administrative — that founders would otherwise need to spend extra time doing themselves, or hire and pay people to do.
Shahezad Contractor is the founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based halal restaurant group Cousin’s Food Inc., which brought in more than $4 million in combined 2025 revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. He regularly uses AI tools, particularly LLMs like Claude, to generate social media content ideas, create training materials for employees and write marketing copy, he says.
Shahezad Contractor, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based halal restaurant group Cousin’s Inc.
CNBC Make It
“Previously, maybe I would have hired a content writer” for some of those functions, says Contractor, 44, but AI helps him “fill in the gaps” in his skill set and do it himself. He even uses AI to scout new locations for his restaurant group — which currently includes a pizza and hoagie shop, a barbecue restaurant and eight burger joints — and to generate financial forecasts for his existing ones, he says.
Contractor previously worked in IT for 24 years. AI’s spread across the tech industry influenced his decision to leave his former career and pursue entrepreneurship in 2024, he says.
More startups, more competition
AI might help some small-business owners, but it won’t necessarily guarantee their success in the long run, says Benjamin Jones, an entrepreneurship and strategy professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. More startups lead to more competition — for preexisting companies, too, he notes.
Chaudhuri echoes the sentiment: “We’ve had more startups than ever in the past two decades, but the stock market is simultaneously more concentrated than ever.”
But entrepreneurship requires risk and failure, says Jones. “It’s just hard to know what’s going to work until you try,” he says. When you start a new business, “that’s the nature of the adventure.”
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