Weekly
Workshops that make something
Ninety minutes, laptops open. Market research with AI, automating a workflow, shipping a landing page, reading your own unit economics. You leave each one with a file, a flow, or a page that didn't exist before.
Chartering at Illinois · First cohort Spring 2027
Your idea.
Your team.
One semester.
AIBE is the Illinois RSO for students who want to use AI to start things — not just read about it. Weekly hands-on workshops, member-led project teams, and hackathons that end with something real on a screen.
Every major. Business, engineering, CS, design, anything.
No experience needed. Not in AI, not in business.
$5 dues a semester.
Why we exist
Illinois has AI clubs. Illinois has startup clubs. This is the room where the two meet.
AI is changing how companies get started faster than any syllabus can keep up with. A student with the right tools can now do, in a weekend, what used to take a seed round and a team of five.
Most AI organizations on campus point at the research. Most entrepreneurship organizations teach the business and leave the building to someone else. AIBE sits in the gap: we treat AI as the thing that lets one student go from a half-formed idea to a working product, a real customer conversation, and a pitch — inside a single semester.
You bring the idea. We bring the workshops, the teammates, the mentors, and the deadline.
- Hands-on sessions where you leave with an artifact, not notes
- Projects you choose — software, services, media, physical products
- Ownership stays with you: AIBE takes no equity and no revenue share
What a member actually does
Four things, every semester.
All semester
A project team of your own
Pick something off the semester's Project Slate, or bring your own idea and recruit two or three people who want to build it. Milestones along the way, a demo day at the end.
Twice a semester
Full-day hackathons
One day, food, API credits and compute provided. Use everything the workshops taught you to get from blank page to MVP and business model. The winning team gets funding and mentorship to keep going.
Monthly
Time with people who've done it
Fireside chats with alumni founders, panels with PMs and analysts using AI daily, investors on what they actually fund, and faculty from Gies and Siebel working on this for a living.
$5
Dues per semester — waivable for anyone who needs it
2×
Hackathons every semester, with funding on the line
10
Meetings to become an Active Member — or join one project team
0%
Equity, revenue or ownership AIBE takes in what you build
The arc
How a semester runs.
Everything is built around one deadline: demo day. The workshops feed the projects, the projects feed the demos, and the hackathons are where teams find each other.
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Weeks 1–2
Kickoff & info session
What AIBE is, what's on the Project Slate this semester, and a social so you meet people before you have to pick a team.
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Weeks 2–14 · weekly
Hands-on workshops
The core of the club. A new skill every week, taught so that someone with no CS background and someone with no business background both leave able to use it.
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Weeks 3–5
Teams form around the Slate
Join a posted project, get matched into one, or pitch your own and recruit. Minimum two people, named team lead, registered with the Secretary.
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Mid-semester
Hackathon #1
A full day: food, API credits, GPU compute. Blank page to MVP and business model between breakfast and the evening pitch.
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Throughout · monthly
Firesides, panels & socials
Founders, operators, investors, faculty. Plus the unprogrammed part: co-founder interviews, startup showcases, and the occasional field trip.
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Finals weeks
Demo day
Every project team shows what it built to a room of judges, mentors and members. Hackathon #2 and the semester's funding decision land here.
Who this is for
Teams work because the people in them don't match.
The constitution says it plainly: AIBE exists to put business, engineering, CS, the sciences, the humanities and the professional schools in the same room. Here's what that looks like in practice.
If you can build
You've never had to find a customer
You can ship. What you haven't done is figure out who it's for, what they'd pay, or whether the thing is worth building at all. That's most of what we teach.
If you can sell
You've been waiting on a technical co-founder
In 2026 you don't have to. You'll learn enough to get a prototype in front of real people yourself — and you'll be the most useful person on any team here.
If you're neither yet
You just want to try something
No experience required, and that's not a courtesy line. Come to one workshop, join one team, see whether you like the feeling. Plenty of people find out they do.
Get in
There is no application. Just show up.
Join the Discord to see what's happening this week, fill out the interest form so we know you're coming, and turn up to a meeting. That's the whole process.
For companies