Paraguay tests whether AI can offset its failing grades in education: starting a business before mastering maths

By Última Hora · September 28, 2026.

This Thursday, from 6:00 p.m., the auditorium of the Universidad Comunera (UCOM) in Asunción hosts the forum "La Próxima Generación Emprendedora," free of charge. The event marks the launch of Carpe Base, a Paraguayan platform designed for young people aged 15 to 25 who want to turn an idea into real sales using artificial intelligence (AI) as an assistant throughout the process: mapping the business, designing the sales page, talking to customers and handling payments. According to its founder, Ian Blume, the platform includes teacher supervision for minors and culminates in the "Sprint Carpe," a 36-hour bootcamp running from October 12 to 17 that ends with a Demo Day before investors.

The figure underpinning the initiative, cited by its organizers, is uncomfortable and revealing at the same time. The OECD's PISA report published this month places only one in ten 15-year-old Paraguayan students at the basic level in mathematics. The same report notes that 45% of those students already use AI tools weekly for their studies. Added to that is the GUESSS study, according to which one in four Paraguayan university students already runs their own company, double the international average.

That combination of figures is the real news behind the forum, more than the event itself. A country with a weak educational foundation in the skills that traditionally underpin entrepreneurship —arithmetic, quantitative analysis— and at the same time with AI adoption and a business-creation rate well above the global average. Blume sums it up with a line that works as a market diagnosis: "the desire is there and the tool is there; what's missing is the method." Carpe Base is betting that this method can be packaged into a one-week bootcamp.

This deserves the caution warranted by any local initiative without measurable results yet: it is a launch, not a success story, and a single bootcamp cohort does not prove that AI can make up for structural gaps in education. But the phenomenon it describes —young people skipping the traditional route of accumulating human capital before starting a business, leaning on AI as a crutch for instant knowledge— is not unique to Paraguay. It is, in fact, the most interesting open question for any emerging economy: can a tool that writes, calculates and advises in real time compensate for years of deficient schooling, or does it merely paper over the gap until the business needs to scale and the missing fundamentals become visible?

Our reading connects with something we have already seen when analyzing AI's impact on education: the winner is whoever uses it to orchestrate and accelerate, not whoever uses it as a substitute for their own judgment. A young person who builds a sales page with AI and lands a first real customer gains something no school project folder provides: a track record. That is genuinely valuable, especially in narrow formal labor markets like Paraguay's, where AI-assisted self-employment can be a legitimate source of income rather than a second-class alternative. It is exactly the kind of distributed abundance we defend over the long term: tools once reserved for those with capital or elite training, now available free or nearly free to a 17-year-old with a phone.

But short-term honesty requires some qualification. If the basic education system keeps failing at the fundamentals —and 90% of students below the basic level in mathematics is a severe figure—, AI risks producing entrepreneurs capable of launching a business but not of auditing their own books, negotiating a complex contract or spotting when the tool gets it wrong. The UCOM forum does not resolve that dilemma; it simply bets, with sound pragmatic judgment, that learning by doing —going out, talking, selling, collecting payment, with AI as copilot— is a better starting point than waiting for the educational foundation to improve before letting anyone start a business. It is a reasonable bet, and also an experiment worth following to see whether the shortcut produces sustainable businesses or just a generation of sellers with no technical safety net behind them.