By Forbes & Company — CPAs and financial advisors for entrepreneurs and small business owners in Alpharetta, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and across the United States.
There’s a shift happening across the American economy, and the numbers behind it are hard to ignore. In the first half of 2026, Americans filed a record 3.23 million new business applications, the strongest January through June total the Census Bureau has ever recorded, and a jump of more than 12 percent over the same period last year. That’s not a blip. It’s part of a longer trend that has been building for a few years now, and it points to something deeper than just a good economy or a bad one. People are choosing to build their own paths instead of waiting for someone else to hand them a job.
To understand why, it helps to look at three forces that are all pushing in the same direction at once: a tighter and more uncertain job market, a wave of AI tools that have made starting a business dramatically cheaper, and a generation of young workers who came of age watching layoffs and instability and decided they’d rather control their own outcome.
Corporate hiring has slowed considerably, and the entry-level job market in particular has become brutally competitive. Recent graduates are feeling this most acutely. Surveys of new graduates have found that nearly four in ten are seriously considering starting their own business, while many others are turning to gig work, freelancing, or skilled trades instead of chasing a traditional office job that may not be there for them. When the ladder into corporate life feels shaky or missing entirely, building your own footing starts to look like the more reliable option, even if it’s the riskier one on paper.
It isn’t just new graduates making this calculation. Plenty of experienced professionals are walking away from traditional corporate structures too, trading the security of a paycheck for the independence of consulting work or a small boutique firm of their own. Some are doing it because they were pushed out by layoffs or restructuring. Others are doing it because they watched colleagues get pushed out and decided they didn’t want to wait around to find out if they were next. Either way, the corporate exit ramp has become a well-traveled road.
If the job market is the push, artificial intelligence is a huge part of what makes the leap feel possible. A single founder today can lean on AI tools to write product descriptions, handle customer service messages, manage social media, and take care of basic bookkeeping, tasks that used to require hiring a small team just to get a business off the ground. Industry researchers have described this shift bluntly: AI isn’t just a reason Gen Z is starting businesses; it’s effectively the staff. A solo founder equipped with the right tools can now do work that once took four or five employees.
That shift has real financial consequences. Startup costs that used to run into the tens of thousands of dollars have come down considerably, and e-commerce platforms and digital infrastructure have made it faster and cheaper than ever to launch an online shop or a service-based business from a laptop at your kitchen table. Roughly half of small business owners say AI tools sparked entrepreneurial ideas they wouldn’t have pursued otherwise, and a majority of small firms are now using generative AI on a daily basis. The barrier to entry hasn’t just gotten lower. In a lot of cases, it’s nearly disappeared.
Nowhere is this shift more visible than among Gen Z. Recent survey data shows that 43 percent of Gen Z adults plan to start a business, the highest entrepreneurial intent of any generation, ahead of Millennials at around 39 percent and well ahead of Gen X. Over half of Gen Z already has some kind of side hustle running, and a striking number of them say they’d like that side hustle to eventually become their main source of income. Roughly two-thirds of Gen Z business owners are already leaning on AI or automation to handle repetitive work, which lines up perfectly with the broader trend.
It’s worth being honest about why this generation in particular has embraced entrepreneurship so wholeheartedly. Many of them entered the workforce during a period marked by mass layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and a sense that loyalty to an employer doesn’t buy much security anymore. Building something of their own, even a small one, offers a version of control that a traditional job increasingly doesn’t. It’s not just optimism. For a lot of young people, it’s a rational response to an unstable landscape.
Perhaps the most encouraging part of this whole story is how much more accessible entrepreneurship has become across the board. This isn’t a movement confined to Silicon Valley or people with venture capital connections. Participation is rising across diverse communities and lower-income households, many of whom are launching small ventures to supplement their income or replace it entirely. A huge share of this activity is happening informally too, through side hustles that haven’t even been formally registered as businesses yet, which suggests the real scale of American entrepreneurial activity is even larger than the official numbers capture.
Of course, not every one of these millions of applications will turn into a thriving, job-creating company. Census projections suggest only a small fraction will grow into businesses with full payrolls within a year, and plenty of new ventures will fold within their first few years, as they always have. But the underlying story here isn’t about which businesses survive. It’s about a fundamental shift in how Americans, especially young ones, are thinking about work itself. Faced with a tougher job market, armed with cheaper and more powerful tools, and shaped by a generation that values control over comfort, more people than ever are deciding that betting on themselves is worth the risk.
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