The ILO is launching SABY – Your AI-powered business advisor

What is SABY?

Starting and running a business means making decisions every day: Is my idea viable? How should I price my product? Where can I find customers? How do I manage my costs? For many entrepreneurs, however, timely and affordable business advice is difficult to access, particularly when they are working on their own or outside established business support networks.

The ILO is therefore launching SABY – The SIYB Buddy for You! SABY is an AI-powered business advisor developed to make practical entrepreneurship guidance available whenever entrepreneurs need it. Building on the ILO’s SIYB programme and its decades of experience supporting entrepreneurs around the world, SABY brings trusted business management guidance into a conversational format.

How does SABY work?

Entrepreneurs can talk to SABY about their business idea or an existing enterprise, ask questions and work through challenges in a dialogue. Rather than simply providing generic answers, SABY asks questions to understand the entrepreneur’s situation and helps them think through possible solutions, from assessing a business idea and understanding customers to costing, pricing, marketing and managing a business.

SABY works through WhatsApp, bringing business advice into a communication channel that many entrepreneurs already use in their daily lives. There is no new platform to learn or dedicated app to download: entrepreneurs can simply start a conversation and return whenever a question or challenge arises. This makes business support easier to access and allows entrepreneurs to engage with it at their own pace, wherever they are.

Why SABY?

SABY is designed to complement, rather than replace, entrepreneurship training and human business advisers. Training can provide entrepreneurs with knowledge, tools and peer learning, while human advisers bring experience, judgement and an understanding of the local context. SABY adds something different: an accessible resource entrepreneurs can return to before, during or after training, or simply when they need help thinking through their next business decision.

SABY is part of a broader effort to explore how generative AI can expand access to reliable, practical and responsible business support. The ambition is not simply to make more information available, but to help entrepreneurs turn information into better decisions, while promoting sustainable enterprises and decent work.

Next to SABY, the ILO is promoting digitalization and AI adoption for growth and decent work through a number of tools and initiatives, including but not limited to the Women in Digital Business Initiative, the ‘Digitalize your Business (DYB) training module for small enterprises, and MAIA, the pioneer version of SABY pilot-tested in Peru.