How a First-Time Founder Used AI to Build a Health Startup — and What It Signals for Business AI Adoption

Michelle Turner, a mother of six with no MBA and no prior startup experience, built Here Now Health — a Medicaid-certified mental health platform for foster children — in under 18 months. Her primary advantage was AI tools she used as a startup advisor, pitch coach, and business planning engine.

Reuters profiled Turner's story as part of a broader examination of how AI is reshaping who can launch and scale a business. Launched in January 2025, Here Now Health now employs 16 people and is certified in three states.

"A mom of six kids who's a first-time founder, who's a sole female founder, should not be able to raise [venture capital]," Turner said. But AI guidance was "like going to a master's level class every day from the robot. It was my startup advisor."

Key Takeaways:

• Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok attributes a recent upturn in new business formations directly to AI, saying it "dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of launching a company."
• The U.S. Federal Reserve has launched a dedicated panel to study AI's productivity, inflation, and labor demand implications — making AI a central policy concern.
• A Brookings Institution and Opportunity@Work study identified roughly 23 million workers whose career paths run directly into high AI-exposure roles, raising displacement risk particularly for workers without college degrees.
• BlackRock's Jean Boivin frames the AI economy as a "scarcity vs. abundance" tension: near-term investment-driven cost pressures alongside potentially transformative long-term productivity gains.

The story highlights a practical signal for business AI: the access cost of high-quality AI guidance has dropped near zero, fundamentally changing who can compete.

Read the full article on Reuters