Read the full transcript of award-winning entrepreneur global AI strategist, and founder Ngozi Elobuike’s talk titled “How To Build Your Dream Life With AI?” at TEDxTUDublin, May 28, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
From Couch to Recognition: A Six-Month Transformation
NGOZI ELOBUIKE: In March of 2023, I was sleeping on my sister’s couch. I know, it was comfy, it was nice, but not the best bed. By six months later, I was named top 50 people to watch by the Irish Times. And the journey of that is what we’ll both go on today, but I think the real crux of it is that I needed a companion. When I was on my sister’s couch, it was my office, it was my bed, but it was also my incubation lab. And that companion was AI.
The Migration Journey: From California to the World
So let’s take it to the start. How does someone like me end up living between the Emerald Isle, France and the US? Originally, I’m from Stockton, California, which is right next to wine country. And when I was young, my parents decided to move from Iwolo Oye in Esiago to California in order to create the life of their dreams. It wasn’t perfect, it had a number of different challenges, but what it revealed to me was how important migration is, how it shapes the way that people exist in the world.
After that, I ditched California, decided to go all the way to the other side of the country, and I ended up studying biology at Howard University, followed by moving all the way to London, eventually to Dublin, and now I live in France, getting my MBA. All of this required that I understand the new digital landscape that we exist in.
Understanding the Digital Landscape: Web 1, 2, and 3
What is this landscape? What does it do? How do we operate in it? Well, let’s look at Web 1. Web 1 was the read-only internet. I mean, I don’t know if anybody had dial-up, but it’s that computer that screeches, and then it breathes heavy, and it turns on. And then after that, we all ended up on the participative social web. That’s Web 2. I don’t know who still has Facebook, Instagram, and everything in between. TikTok, if you’re a Gen Z-er like me.
And now we’ve entered into some of the most interesting territory, Web 3. This is the web that has the ability to read, to write, to articulate itself, and to challenge what we know as intelligence. I think many people are scared of this really dark underbelly, unsure what it means to navigate and traverse this territory.
The Jack-of-All-Trades Philosophy
But the saying goes, the creator economy will be fueled by those who decide to become a jack-of-all-trades. And the saying goes as well, “jack-of-all-trades is a master of none,” but that’s not complete. In fact, it’s “jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, which is way better than a master of one.” So I’m Jill.
Life as a Scientific Experiment
And the first thing that I thought to myself was, how do I take my background as a scientist and apply it? What does a scientist do? They think about life as an experiment. You have dependent variables, and you have independent variables. You have things that you can control in your settings. And as people like to say, “man makes plans and God laughs.” There’s so many things we can’t control.
In articulating life as a scientist, you begin to think to yourself, what are the independent variables that if I plug in, have the ability to transform my life? AI is an independent variable. If we’re thinking farther in science, it actually has the ability to act as an enzyme. It has the ability to lower the activation energy needed to complete a task.
Let’s look at the example of Perplexity AI. This is like a chat search on steroids, so they say. You’re able to ask it a question. “Hey, I have no idea how to start my own business. Create me a business plan.” And it populates responses as necessary.
The Sociological Perspective: Network Poverty
So when we begin to see our life as an experiment, with layers of things we have to, we can understand, we have to then think, what is it that’s actually barring me from making appropriate changes? And that’s when I take off my science hat and put on my hat as a sociologist. Sociologists ask themselves, what is it that is preventing me from having a rich and robust thriving life?
If you turn to those who believe in the network theory, they’ll say, in fact, what is robbing you from dignity is not your inability to access money. It’s not your inability to access power. Really, it’s the poverty, the network poverty, the network impoverishment that you’re facing. How good is your social network?
With social media, we have an extensive network of weak ties, parasocial relationships, people that we think that we know, right? I know everybody has that celebrity that they watch. You know what’s going on next in their life. It’s like TV.
Building Relationships with AI Advisors
These aren’t real relationships or relationships as they’re categorically defined, but they have the ability to transform your life. This is where AI comes in again. In the absence of an advisory board that has the ability to advise you on your business or the next step, how does AI slot in? Instead of asking your friend, who may be a naysayer, “Hey, I’m thinking about starting this new idea venture,” consider asking AI. Prompt chat with GPT and say, “I have an idea for X. Give me advice as if you were Oprah,” or insert the person that you’re aspiring to be. This allows you to gain insight on things that you typically wouldn’t have access to.
You build a portfolio of advisors that have the ability to drive you to the next stage.
Think Like a Consultant
The next stage, once we decide if it’s resource poverty that we’re experiencing, if it’s time poverty that we’re experiencing, or if it’s the fact that we’re fearful and unable to make decisions, is to think of ourselves like consultants. I used to be a consultant, and when I put down my consulting hat, I realized I had actually learned how to transform my life. What consulting teaches you is to think about life as an experiment, but to think along the lines of ROI, return of investment, MVP, minimally viable product, and USP, unique selling point.
Do you know what you spend your time on? If I looked at you and said, “Okay, today, what have you been up to?” Me, I’d say, “Scroll on my phone for four hours, and then I kind of looked over my speech.” The Pareto principle says 20% of what we do yields 80% of the results in our life, and unless you’re able to do a time audit, then you will never really know what it is that makes up the majority of your time.
Building Your Minimum Viable Product
So once you understand that, you build an MVP, a minimally viable product, centered on the problem that you’ve identified in the first step. If you want to test whether or not your audience will be interested in a new wine that you’re presenting to them, the first step is not to create a wine. The first step is to make a product mock-up to see if the design that you’ve envisioned is something that your audience has an appetite for, and do A-B testing to see if version one or version B works better. How do you do that without the tools? Packdora AI is an example of how you create mock-ups.
I think when we move past the point where we have a minimally viable product, we put it out, we use our friends as test guinea pigs, we have what is next, an idea that provides us an example of how to test a market. Market opportunities are really important, and there’s a strong opportunity to use tools to see if what you’ve designed is viable for a market.
Think Like an Entrepreneur
So we’re going into the last step, which is to think like my favorite category of people, to think like an entrepreneur. Sparring is training. You will not cut your teeth in your bedroom with your idea on a piece of paper refusing to take action on it. Sparring is training, and you go to war with your AI. You ask it to challenge your ideas, to find gaps in things you didn’t identify before, and to help you figure out what it is that will be the first point to failure.
Again, there are many things that you can use to gain insights. Appify is a good example of a web scraper. You can look at all of your competitors, you know, all the other people that are building in your venture, plug this in, their Instagram accounts, into Appify. It scrapes the data, figures out which of their posts are most popular, what has the most likes and comments, and then you can take that insight and analyze it as data to give you insights in how to build next and how your venture compares with it.
Consolidating AI Tools
There’s something really amazing happening. There’s so many different tools, it’s really hard to keep up, and all this fragmentation is leading people to think, how do I consolidate these tools? That’s where Concierge AI comes in. It consolidates all these tools together and helps you, instead of going to ChatGPT, Gamma, Otter AI, etc., etc., bring them all together and create an ecosystem.
The last thing I’ll say about an entrepreneur, except that they are some of the most admirable people I’ve ever met, is that they understand the tool of continuous improvement. Growth hacking is what startup entrepreneurs created as a term back in 2010.
Growth Hacking: The Power of Exponential Improvement
What is growth hacking? Imagine if you got not 1% better every day, but 10% better every day. I don’t want to move into a space in which we’re all operating like robots, but I do want us to be really thoughtful about the lives that we lead. One of the great philosophers say, “It’s not that we have a short life, but rather that we waste it.”
What growth hacking does is think about what are the steps to take your idea to execution. If I want to launch a product, how will my user gain access to the product? Where will they buy it from? Then, after they’ve bought it, how do they deliver me feedback? Point A to B can be improved, but point B to C can also be improved. If you think about a system of continuous improvement, you thoroughly analyze each step in your user journey and think about how they can gain greater access to your product or service.
Ethical Questions About AI and Human Intelligence
The last thing I have to say is more of a philosophical question. When I was a student at Chattopadhyay, we didn’t really get to talk much about ethics, about what happens when you build a second brain on AI systems, when agentic AI begins to blur the lines of what’s happening in the digital world and what’s happening in the analog world.
I say often, does that mean I become the AI? Does that mean the AI compels me to develop it? Does that mean that human intelligence, intellectual property is compromised? I think everybody has the ability to come up with a decision for themselves, but what I do know is that technology, for me, must dignify my human experience.
Unless we have a global blackout, God forbid, we will always become reliant and increasingly more reliant on technology. Will we ever live autonomous lives again? Will we ever be able to leave our phones for a month and live without electricity? Perhaps not, but what can we do?
Learning from History: The Industrial Revolution Lesson
If we look at Henry Ford and we look at the first industrial revolution, we understand that there was something happening. We had five people in an assembly line, and all of a sudden, a machine pulls up to the assembly line, and it’s seated at the end. All five people look to their left and see the machine turn on and think, “Oh, it’s fine.”
As soon as it turns on, they see the machine is working at 10x their speed, and just as they predicted, the scarlet letters come in of layoffs, and these five people invariably become replaced by a machine. But then, as time has it, the machine arm sputters and dies. All of a sudden, one person comes back through that door. It’s a familiar place for them, because they used to be on the assembly line, and instead of being afraid of the technology, they began to understand it, and they were the ones to correct the issues in that machine.
Future-Proofing Our Lives and Systems
That was the legacy of then, when people worried that the computer would completely demolish the book industry. This is the legacy of now, where people are really considering what does it mean to study law and medicine in times where the computer that we have access to now might functionally erase these jobs. How do we future-proof our systems, future-proof our lives, and design something that dignifies the future a bit better?
These are really existential questions, and the next time you open up ChatGPT and ask it to make you work out, or ask it to give you advice on the arguments you’ve been having with your boyfriend—not that I do that—or ask it to give you insight about a trend that you’ve been seeing but don’t really understand. Think about the implications for the future. Think about if it’s helping you design the life that you want, and if it’s dignifying the dream that you’ve discovered.
Conclusion: Building Your System for Success
And above all, build a system that takes you from ideation to prototyping to testing and implementing as soon as you can. Sparring is training, if you guys didn’t hear before, and it’s time to put yourself in the seat of the person who walks back in to fix the broken arm.
