Why Mentoring Still Matters: The Non-digital Side of MOBIpreneur
Open any business owner's laptop today and you'll likely find a chatbot, an AI writing assistant, and a handful of apps promising to automate everything from invoicing to marketing. Digital tools have never been more powerful, more accessible, or more widely used.
So why does MOBIpreneur, a project built around mobile micro-learning and an AI-driven chatbot, put a mentoring programme at the heart of its methodology?
Because no chatbot, however advanced, can fully replace the value of a real conversation with someone who has actually walked the entrepreneurial path, who is able to share his own know-how.
Indeed, research highlights the crucial role of mentoring in supporting new and small businesses. According to the OECD, mentoring and business advisory services contribute to improving firms’ growth, survival and productivity prospects by strengthening entrepreneurs’ strategic management capabilities1. This impact is also reflected in global surveys: 37% of young entrepreneurs reported that having access to a mentor had a greater influence on the survival and success of their business than funding alone (Youth Business International, 2020). Furthermore, evidence from Sage Business Navigators (2014) indicates that 70% of small businesses receiving mentoring survive for five years or more, a rate significantly higher than that of businesses without mentoring support.
Two things that work better together
MOBIpreneur's training model is built on two complementary layers.
The first is digital: short, practical lessons delivered directly via WhatsApp through the MOBI chatbot. This layer is designed to fit into busy schedules, reach people wherever they are, and make entrepreneurial education available regardless of location or background.
The second layer is human: a structured mentoring programme that has paired small groups of learners with experienced mentors for five weekly sessions, following the same five-week curriculum delivered through the chatbot. Mentors don't repeat what the lessons already say. Instead, they help participants translate general content into impactful decisions that make sense for their own business, at their own stage, in their own context.
It's the combination of the two layers that makes the learning experience complete.
What technology struggles to do
AI tools are extraordinary at gathering, summarising, and generating information. What they struggle with is judgment. This is exactly where mentors step in. Across the mentoring sessions, they help entrepreneurs participants clarify their starting point, define a concrete goal, identify what is really blocking progress, and commit to one clear action before the next session. They challenge unclear thinking, share hard-won experience from their own entrepreneurial or professional journeys, and hold participants accountable in a way that a lesson on a screen simply cannot.
Because mentors possess tacit industry knowledge, they also help new founders avoid costly first-time mistakes and adapt their strategies to shifting market trends2.
That kind of know-how, built from years of trial, error, and lived experience, is very difficult to package and standardize into an algorithm. It is personal, contextual, and often unspoken until someone asks the right question at the right moment.
For MOBIpreneur, the value of the mentoring programme goes beyond the five individual sessions. Alongside the mentoring cycle, the project also foresaw the organization of networking and community-building events, bringing participants and mentors together to share experiences, build connections, and reduce the isolation that many small business owners, especially those starting out, working remotely, or coming from underrepresented backgrounds, often experience.
Learning with people, not instead of people
The MOBIpreneur approach highlights that successful entrepreneurship development requires both digital innovation and human connection.
While mobile learning and digital tools make knowledge more accessible, flexible and adapted to entrepreneurs’ realities, mentoring sessions and in-person networking events provide the personal interaction, trust and exchange of experiences needed to transform knowledge into meaningful action.
By creating spaces where entrepreneurs, mentors and local communities can connect, share challenges and build lasting relationships, MOBIpreneur strengthens not only individual skills but also the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In a world increasingly shaped by digital transformation and AI, the ability to combine technological opportunities with human support remains essential for building more resilient, confident and connected entrepreneurs.
1(OECD, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1787/299705ad-en)
2(Kunaka & Moos, 2019, https://doi.org/10.4102/sajesbm.v11i1.214)