This trip is slowly nearing its end, yet I feel like we arrived just yesterday. Our morning consisted of a site visit to a startup called MCISE that focused on social entrepreneurship, a term that was truly redefined for me after the visit. After juice and plenty of cookies, our group headed back to our host family homes for lunch. We came back to the CCCL in the afternoon for our last lecture of the trip! Woohoo!! All excitement aside, this lecture discussed a topic I had been eagerly waiting to hear about during this journey abroad in Morocco: artificial intelligence.

We heard from a Shark Tank Morocco investor who had a lot of insight to share about AI and its impacts. What most strongly stuck with me from this discussion was that the speaker believed that adaptability is the most important skill to have. While some may think it’s creativity or perseverance, I actually agree with the speaker that adaptability is the most essential skill when it comes to working with AI. It is constantly evolving and within only the past few years has it really changed significantly. In such little time, everyone in the world needed to learn how to navigate the implications of AI’s presence on their jobs, lifestyles, and futures. We even needed to learn how to efficiently and responsibly use AI, a practice that is still constantly in need of improvements. For entrepreneurs, it may negatively affect creative processes if they become too reliant on it. With the tools used properly and responsibly, entrepreneurs actually have the power to use AI to make their creativity more unique, bolder, and more effective in its goals. I think that AI has helped me become more creative at times, but there have also been times where it confused me too much to a point where I lost all my creativity.

I mainly use AI for planning. As an extremely Type A person, I enjoy organizing my life with detailed lists and plans, and AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini have been extremely helpful in doin this. Whether it’s designing a potential course schedule for my next semester or planning a road trip, I find myself utilizing AI the most for organization and planning activities. This was even helpful for me when I needed to plan what to buy in the souks. With the trip coming to a close, I need to ensure that I have gifts for everyone important in my life, friends, family, neighbors, and more! I used Gemini to help me make a detailed list of who I should remember to buy a gift for and some suggested items I could purchase for them. With AI’s help, I was able to efficiently knock out gifts on my list for most of my family members, with only a few things for my sister and dad still needed.

My trip to the souks today even ended with a surprise visit to a shop owner’s house, where he took me and Yoana to show us his extra inventory of bags. It was so cool to see how different his home looked from that of my host family’s, and his extremely welcoming smile and eagerness to take us with him as he searched for more bag options brought a little extra joy to my exhausting day. After a tiring few hours of shopping, I even got to enjoy a delicious bucket of KFC to cure all my fried chicken cravings. While I have enjoyed eating Moroccan food all these days, I needed a little bit of American food to keep me going for this final week! I was also able to see the Rabat Marina and Hassan Tower in the evening thanks to the suggestions from my sisters to see these sights. Everything in Rabat looked so pretty at night, and I’m glad I got to see more places before we leave in 3 days.