Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary says if he were 25 today, he’d chase these two opportunities in AI
Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary says if he were 25 today, he’d chase these two opportunities in AI
Publish Date: 2026-07-05 09:26:00
Source Domain: fortune.com
If Kevin O’Leary, 71, had to do it all over again at 25, he said he’d focus on two key areas in the tech industry to make it big.
The Shark Tank star and chairman of O’Leary Ventures said in a video earlier this year that if he were a 20-something again, he would focus on the business that is most booming right now: artificial intelligence.
“I think AI growth is going to be exponential,” he said.
But in the vast AI industry, O’Leary said he would focus on either helping small businesses implement AI tools or developing data centers.
Rather than go straight for the corporate giants, O’Leary said he would first try to narrow his focus to helping businesses with fewer than 500 employees implement AI. These 36 million small businesses make up just under half of the U.S. GDP, according to the Small Business Administration—and while they likely want to use AI, they may not be as quick to adapt as large corporations.
This opens up an opportunity for self-starters to help businesses get better control of their data and set up systems to analyze it with AI, he said.
“There’s going to be a massive amount of people wanting to use it that don’t know how to and they’re willing to pay to solve that pain point,” O’Leary said.
He was careful to draw a distinction, though, from traditional consulting, framing the opportunity as “implementation and execution.” O’Leary, who is an Executive Fellow at Harvard for the 2025-2026 academic year, previously told Fortune he warns his MBA students against pursuing consulting, describing the career as a “slow drift into mediocrity.”
AI’s real estate
O’Leary’s second opportunity, data center development, may take more money and a little more legwork, but is just as ripe with opportunity.
“The biggest pain point in AI is data centers,” O’Leary said. “That’s real-estate development.”
There is a mismatch today when it comes to the supply and demand…
