GCSE Results Day: What Is The Most Valuable Thing A 16-Year-Old Can Do With AI Right Now?

More than 5.7 million GCSE results landed yesterday, sending a fresh wave of talent toward sixth form, college and the workforce.

They’re stepping into the working world at a truly unusual moment. A 16-year-old with a laptop and an internet connection can now research markets, write production-quality code, prototype, create a product and reach a global audience faster than a well-funded team could have managed a decade ago. The tools are free, the barrier is low and the ceiling is high.

However, this access doesn’t automatically translate into advantage. A UNESCO survey from 2025 found that 62% of young people were already using AI in real-world contexts, while only 30% had received any formal training in how to do so effectively. There’s a difference between using AI and using it well.

What These Results Mean In An AI-Shaped World

The students who opened their results yesterday are looking at two to four years of further training, education or early work before they enter the workforce in any sustained way. The job market they’ll arrive in will look meaningfully different from the one today’s graduates are entering, which itself looks nothing like the one their parents navigated.

According to Skills England’s 2026 report, practical AI literacy is now baseline table stakes. That means knowing how to implement AI workflows, verify and recognise when the tech falls short. Recent World Economic Forum research reaches the same conclusion. As models evolve, analytical rigor and communication are core capabilities that retain long-term value. What this means is that choosing a specific career path at 16 is less important than becoming the kind of person who can do several things well under uncertainty.

To find out what a 16-year-old should actually do with today’s tech, we went straight to the founders and operators who hire them: which skills will hold their value in an AI world? Here’s what they said.

Our Experts

• Vladimir Beskorovainyi, Enterprise AI Architect and CTO, Besk Tech
• Michal Piszczek, Chief Technology Officer, Archdesk
• Matt Francois, Fractional CTO and Founder, SaaS Tune
• Peter Kazan, Founder and CEO, Atlantic Tech
• Ene Anyogo, Founder, Product of Agency
• Tyler Allen, Founder, Lookdrop and CEO, Evora Social
• Thiago Vieira, Founder, Cybertech Acceleration
• Daniel Uusitalo, Partner, 4impact Capital
• Sam Dhar, Staff Software Engineer, Galileo
• Courtney Olujobi, Principal, Moon Pursuit Capital

Vladimir Beskorovainyi, Enterprise AI Architect and CTO, Besk Tech

“The tools have removed the floor of the career, not the ceiling. The tasks a sixteen-year-old would once have been paid to learn on, the simple ones, are exactly the ones that got automated first. What is left starts harder than it used to.

“So the single most valuable thing is not learning to prompt. It is learning to check. A teenager can now produce a working application or a thousand words of analysis in a minute, and almost nobody their age, or twice their age, can tell you whether the result is correct. Verification is the scarce skill, and it is getting scarcer while output gets cheaper.

“The way to build it is unglamorous. Make something that actually runs and that one other person depends on. Not a demo, not a portfolio piece. Something with a real user, that breaks at inconvenient times, that you have to fix. Everything that matters sits on the other side of that. Load, malformed input, and a model that is confidently wrong at two in the morning.

“And learn the difference between a mistake you can undo and one you cannot. That judgement is what people will still be paying for in ten years, because it is the one thing the machine cannot make on your behalf.”

Michal Piszczek, Chief Technology Officer, Archdesk

“I broke into security research years before anyone would have hired me, so this comes from someone whose career started with unsupervised curiosity and real consequences.

“Nobody advising these students, including me, knows what questions 2030 will actually bring. We are planning for a post-AI economy with a pre-AI imagination. Preparing fixed answers is a waste of time. The useful skill is becoming the person who can stand behind an answer. There is a law underneath this: technology never destroys value, it relocates scarcity. AI has made competent execution nearly free. Code, prose and routine analysis now cost the price of electricity. What stays expensive is knowing what to build, verifying whether the output is actually correct, and putting your own name on the line for the outcome.

“The best thing a 16-year-old can do right now is ship one small, real project with their name on it. An app with ten genuine users. A benchmark other people can run and verify. Then take responsibility when things break. Nobody asked for it; that is why it counts. On subjects to study: focus on maths and physics. AI handles both well, but you need them to spot when the model is feeding you nonsense. The strongest people on my team are not the fastest producers. They are the best error detectors. You can build that at sixteen with a cheap laptop and stubbornness.”

Matt Francois, Fractional CTO and Founder, SaaS Tune

“The single most valuable thing a 16-year-old can do right now is start building, launching and validating real products or services. There has never been a better time for creative young people to build something and get it out into the world. AI has reduced the time and capital requirements for building products to near zero, and tools like Lovable, Replit and Claude allow anyone, even those who don’t yet know how to code, to generate products and marketing materials in minutes.

“In a world where AI slop inundates us with low-value, generic noise that markets ignore, a teenager with a unique perspective and tasteful creative direction that can deliver value is more irreplaceable than ever. AI is a 10x multiplier for original human vision, not a substitute for it, so anyone who can combine human taste and curation with AI orchestration skills will do well.

“The specific tools used in any industry constantly change, but human adaptability and ability to execute endure. Any teenager who wants to stand out should focus on the core loop of delivering value: identify a problem, build a solution, get real-world validation through paying customers, active users or other measurable impact. Candidates who can show a portfolio of completed projects consistently outperform those who can only present a traditional CV with exam scores. The job market rewards people who can reliably deliver promised outcomes, not those who scored highly on exams.”

Peter Kazan, Founder and CEO, Atlantic Tech

“Ask AI better questions than everyone else in the room. That’s the most valuable thing a 16-year-old can do with the technology available today. I grew up in a blue-collar family, and the lesson that stuck with me building Atlantic Tech is that having information doesn’t mean much if you don’t know what to do with it. AI has made access to information universal. Judgement hasn’t caught up, and judgement is still what separates people.

“If I were 16 now, I’d spend less time chasing whatever tool just launched and more time getting good at the fundamentals underneath it: writing clearly, thinking in systems, understanding how a problem works before you try to automate any part of it. The tools available today will be replaced within a few years. The ability to reason through a problem from first principles won’t be.

“The hardest skill to build is discernment: knowing which answer to trust, which shortcut costs you understanding later and which problems are actually worth solving. Tools will keep changing for their whole careers. The ones who end up building something that lasts are the ones who can think clearly no matter which tool they’re holding.”

Ene Anyogo, Founder, Product of Agency

“Ask me what a 16-year-old should be doing with AI right now and my answer isn’t “make more with it.” It’s learning to judge what’s actually worth keeping.

“These tools will write the code, draft the essay, run the numbers. What they won’t do is flag the moment they’re confidently wrong, and they’re wrong more often than they sound. So use them constantly, but treat everything they hand back as a first draft you’re allowed to distrust. Is this true? Does this number measure what it claims to? Would I bet a real decision on it?

“The tell for me is never the grammar. It’s when a student can’t defend a single choice in work an AI clearly wrote for them. Generating output is nearly free now; being the person who can look at an interestingly slick answer and say “that’s wrong, and here’s how I know” is not. The teenagers who’ll do well aren’t the fastest at prompting. They’re the ones who’ve learned to argue with the machine.”

Tyler Allen, Founder, Lookdrop and CEO, Evora Social

“The single most valuable thing a 16-year-old can do right now is put their work in front of strangers. Not a tutorial project. A niche app, a newsletter, edited reels for a local business, anything with an audience that isn’t a teacher.

“I’m 24. I learned photography the way my generation learned everything: YouTube, the free mentor for skills nobody around you could teach. That path took me from teenage photographer to agency owner to developing an iPhone camera app, Lookdrop. AI took that teacher’s role and went further. It can act as the director of operations of a company you have no capital to staff. I handed entire tasks to agents that functioned like employees, and that one-person operation put Lookdrop in front of users in over 40 countries within six months of release.

“Most teenagers already have the raw skills, taste and judgement among them. They just never had anything that let them explore it. Now the barrier is gone. All it takes is imagination, ambition and the ability to lead, because leading AI agents is a rehearsal for leading people, and it surfaces skills they never knew they had.”

Thiago Vieira, Founder, Cybertech Acceleration

“I started my first business at sixteen. It wasn’t good. But it had real customers, and it taught me more than anything I did in the next five years.

“Build something small and let strangers use it. Not a course. Not a certificate. Not a tutorial project that dies in a folder. Something real, used by people who don’t love you.

“AI made building cheap, and in doing so it killed building as proof of competence. Five years ago a working app said something about you. Now it says nothing – anyone can produce one in an afternoon. What didn’t get cheaper is knowing what’s worth building, and knowing whether yours is any good. That’s judgement, and judgement is domain-specific. So go deep on one subject. Deep enough to catch an AI being confidently wrong about it. People who can only generate will be commodity labour within a decade. The ones who can generate, judge, validate, collect feedback and start again will be the ones signing off.”

Daniel Uusitalo, Partner, 4impact Capital

“The short answer is mathematics. It’s the subject that keeps coming up when I ask founders what actually prepared them, and I’ve had that conversation with tens if not hundreds of them by now. Maths teaches you to reason about things you can’t directly see, which is most of what building with AI involves.

“Whether a person ends up with a career in AI or tech at all depends far more on curiosity than on any particular learning background, especially with how fast the tools are moving. Inside the young startups I work with, functions mesh. Technical product, customer success and sales all run as multidisciplinary workstreams, and people cross into each other’s lanes all the time. Being a salesperson at a modern AI-native company covers a far broader spectrum of tasks than it conventionally did.

“Study maths. But the main thing a 16-year-old needs to develop is an openness to working across a role, not just within the confines of one. A curious person will be driven towards this intuitively. The tools are free and sitting right there, so start using them for something real and see what happens.”

Sam Dhar, Staff Software Engineer, Galileo

“The single most valuable thing a 16-year-old can do right now is build something that actually works. The barrier to building technology has collapsed. A teenager today can use AI to help write code, design an interface, troubleshoot an error, analyse data and deploy an application. Pick a problem you care about and try to solve it. Then break it, fix it and make it better.

“AI will continue to make writing code easier. What’s much harder to automate is knowing what to build, breaking a problem into pieces, asking good questions, recognising when an AI-generated answer is wrong and having the persistence to figure out why. Get comfortable moving between AI tools rather than becoming dependent on one. Models and platforms will change dramatically by the time today’s 16-year-olds enter the workforce.

“If you spend the next two years building things, experimenting and learning how these systems actually work, you’ll have something much more valuable than a list of AI courses on your CV. Proof that you know how to turn an idea into something real.”

Courtney Olujobi, Principal, Moon Pursuit Capital

“The single most valuable thing I’d do at 16 is start building something with the technology already available. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a company or even particularly sophisticated. I’d use AI to build a simple product, automate a problem I encounter, analyse something I’m interested in or turn an idea into something another person can actually use.

“AI has made knowledge extraordinarily accessible, so the advantage is no longer simply knowing more information. The real advantage comes from knowing which questions are worth asking, being able to make decisions with incomplete information and understanding how to turn an idea into something useful.

“Your network still matters enormously, particularly when access to information itself is no longer scarce. The skills I’d focus on are judgement, curiosity, problem-solving and accountability. There is a real difference between understanding technology intellectually and having to make something work in the real world. At 16, you can afford to experiment, take risks and build things that might fail. The knowledge, relationships and judgement you gain from doing that tend to compound over time.”