The Thirty-Five Percent: Fighting for What Remains
It all started with the idea of using AI to help protect people from fake news. We started the design thinking process, gathered primary research, and began ideating eventually reaching a wall — the fake news space was highly saturated and so we had to pivot.
Pivoting 4 days into the accelerator program, as dangerous as it rethinks and starts from scratch. We spent a number of hours delving into different topics and passions we had forgotten about. We even considered the possibility of helping young teens with financial literacy. In conclusion, we knew that climate change was a pressing issue and thought we would like to help use AI to tackle the issue
Every week the number of trees cut down was the size of London — these are truths that most people do not know or can imagine. Thus we initially thought that the most effective way to combat the issue was to educate and pose a solution. The solution we posed was to use AI to predict areas that are likely to be deforested in order for people to understand the true magnitude of the issue and to warn the appropriate people. This meant that the Actions to, prevent these areas to be deforested, would be put into effect with immediacy.
Eventually, we came to the realization that the commercial viability of our product was dormant. We needed money to make a change. So after speaking to a number of mentors we decided to pivot again. With a website already made, we decided to spin our idea into one in which we could generate more profit and use the website we built as a marketing strategy.
The pitching day came, in the hustle and bustle of it all, we created something which we were very unsure of. Conscious of time, we realized that simplicity was our best friend and we wanted to communicate the facts and allow the judges to clearly understand our stance and product.
One thing I learned is that success is defined by you. As a team, we were so proud of persevering and completing the pitch that we did not care about winning. However, the icing on the cake was being part of the top 5 teams and receiving a book as a reward for our efforts.
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For more information about the AI Accelerator: https://www.teensinai.com/accelerator/
