One full day
Breakfast to evening pitches. Long enough to build something, short enough that you can't overthink it.
Programs
Everything we run, and why each piece is there.
Workshops teach the skill. Project teams give it somewhere to go. Hackathons compress a semester into a day. Speakers show you what it looks like when it works.
Weekly · the core of the club
Workshops.
Ninety minutes, laptops open, one skill. Written so that a student with no CS background and a student with no business background both leave able to use the thing.
This is the running list of sessions on our docket. The order and the exact slate change each semester based on what members ask for — and if you want to lead one, you can.
Discovery
Mining Reddit, reviews and forums for real customer pain
Where the complaints already are. Pull them, cluster them with a model, and find the problem worth solving before you write a line of anything.
Discovery
Using AI for market research and customer discovery
Who is this actually for? Sizing a market, writing interview scripts, and getting to a real conversation with a stranger this week.
Discovery
Stress-testing your idea: AI as the skeptical investor
Hand your idea to a model told to tear it apart, then answer it. The cheapest due diligence you will ever run.
Build
Creating MVPs and finding solutions to problems
From a described problem to something clickable. The smallest version that lets a real person tell you you're wrong.
Build
Coding with Claude Code, OpenAI and friends
For people who code and people who don't. How to drive these tools so they produce something you can actually maintain.
Build
Launching a micro-SaaS, solo
The whole stack for a one-person product: auth, payments, hosting, support. What you can ignore and what you can't.
Build
Connecting AI to your tools with MCP
Wiring models into the systems you already use, so they do work instead of describing it.
Build
Workflow automation
Finding the repetitive thing you do every week and deleting it. Emails, scheduling, reporting, intake.
Go to market
AI marketing
Positioning, copy, creative and channel testing — and where a model helps versus where it produces noise.
Go to market
AI for SEO: keyword research and posts that rank
How search works now, what still earns traffic, and the difference between useful content and slop.
Go to market
Creating and selling digital products
Templates, courses, ebooks. The fastest honest path from skill to revenue for a student.
Run it
Pricing strategy: tiers, anchors and experiments
What to charge, how to find out, and why your first price is almost always too low.
Run it
Unit economics: are you actually making money?
The arithmetic founders avoid. Cost per customer, cost per user, and the point where the numbers stop working.
Run it
Analytics and data insight with AI
Getting from a pile of events to a decision. What to measure and what to ignore.
Run it
Running A/B tests as a one-person team
Small-sample reality, what you can and can't conclude, and how to avoid fooling yourself.
Run it
Turning customer feedback into product decisions
Synthesizing a hundred messages into the three things worth doing next.
Run it
Writing SOPs so AI (or a future hire) can run a task
Documenting your own work well enough to hand it off. The skill that makes delegation possible.
Special
Live build: a business from scratch in three hours
Officers at the front, no safety net, every decision made in the room. Idea to landing page to first outreach.
Special
Case studies: what has actually worked
Teardowns of companies using AI well, and what a student can copy from them.
Want to teach one of these, or something that isn't on the list? Members lead workshops all the time — message an officer on Discord.
All semester
Project teams.
The reason the workshops exist. Every member is encouraged to be on a team, and being on one makes you an Active Member outright.
The Project Slate
At the start of each semester the Executive Board publishes a slate: a set of defined projects and challenge prompts, each with a goal, deliverables, milestones and a demo-day date. It exists so that nobody has to arrive with an idea already formed.
Three ways onto a team
- Pick one off the Slate. Find a project that sounds like your kind of problem and join it.
- Get matched. Tell us roughly what you're interested in and we'll put you somewhere sensible.
- Bring your own. Pitch your idea, recruit teammates, get it approved, and it becomes a team like any other.
How a team works
At least two people. A named team lead. Registered with the Secretary. Progress reported at milestones, and a presentation of what you built at demo day. The Director of Projects — or the Vice President, until that role is filled — handles team formation and keeps milestones honest.
Not just software
Services, media, physical products, marketplaces, content businesses. If it can be built and put in front of a customer, it can be a project.
You own what you make
Ideas, work product and any venture that grows out of a team belong to the people who created them. AIBE takes no ownership, equity or revenue share, and will not represent or imply University endorsement of anything you build. We do strongly encourage every team that plans to keep going to put a written founder agreement in place early — roles, contributions, ownership, decisions — before it gets complicated.
Twice a semester
Hackathons.
A full day. Food, API credits and GPU compute provided. You use everything the workshops taught you to get from a blank page to an MVP and a business model, and pitch it that evening.
The winning team gets funding to keep building and mentorship to go with it. It is also, in practice, where most teams find each other.
Prize amount and sponsors for the first hackathon are still being confirmed — watch Discord. If your company would like to fund one, here is what that looks like.
Credits provided
API credits and compute so that cost is never the reason a team stops.
MVP and model
Judging looks at the business as hard as the build. A beautiful demo with no customer doesn't win.
Growing outward
We intend to scale these up and eventually invite other schools, including alongside HackIllinois.
Roughly twice a month
Speakers & panels.
People who are doing this already, in the room, answering questions from students who are trying to.
Fireside
Founder chats with Illinois alumni
Alumni who built AI startups, talking about the parts that don't make it into the press release.
Panel
“AI in my job”
Product managers, consultants and analysts who use these tools every day. What's actually changed in their work, and what hasn't.
Panel
What investors look for in AI startups
VCs on the difference between a demo and a company, and what gets funded right now.
Talk
Research Park companies
Teams from the offices two blocks south on how large organizations are really deploying this.
Talk
Faculty from Gies and Siebel
Professors working on AI and business as their day job, on where the research and the market disagree.
The rest of it
Everything else we run.
Demo day
End of each semester. Every project team shows what it built to judges, mentors and members. The closest thing we have to a final exam, and far more useful.
Socials, monthly
A kickoff social, co-founder “interviews” where you pitch yourself to potential teammates, and startup showcases. Teams form over food more reliably than over forms.
Field trips
Once or twice a year, out to the offices of AI companies. Members who want to go chip in roughly $40–50 toward transport.
The weekly newsletter
A member editorial team picks the best articles, papers and launches of the week and sends them out. A good job if you want to read widely and have a reason to.
Idea sprints
Short, sharp sessions where the whole room generates and tears apart ideas together. Where a lot of project teams start.
Mentors
Faculty, staff, alumni, graduate students and industry professionals who advise project teams and lead sessions. If you'd like to mentor, get in touch.
Dates, rooms and who's speaking.
This page is what we run. The calendar is when we run it — every workshop, talk and hackathon with a date on it, ready to drop into your own calendar.