For Melanie Herbert, years of hospital treatments for a serious medical condition fueled an early interest in how healthcare providers communicate and address their patients' needs.

The experience informed her decision years later to launch Sync Labs, a health technology startup that aims to improve care for older Americans, while she was still a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I feel like it's unfortunately a very neglected space where a lot of the technology and tools are really behind," Herbert, 23, told CBS News.

Although such entrepreneurship is clearly unusual for young people, it is by no means unheard of these days. Research from the Bank of America Institute shows that Generation Z members are contributing "disproportionately" to a recent surge in business formation.

In a trend that highlights how younger Americans are helping catalyze economic growth, the number of new business applications filed by Gen Zers jumped 66% in June compared with a year ago. That far outpaced applications filed by other generations, the Bank of America Institute found.

Young Americans are helping fuel a broader jump in applications to form businesses. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Americans filed more than 531,000 business applications in June, more than double the 2020 figure.

Scott Issen, CEO of Future Founders, a nonprofit group that helps nurture entrepreneurial skills, said demand for the organization's services is surging — a shift he attributes to a change in many young people's attitude toward employment.

"Macroeconomically, I think there's less interest year over year for young people to work for others," he told CBS News. "They would prefer to be their own bosses and create their own opportunity."

The burst in entrepreneurship among younger Americans isn't limited to graduates of prestigious universities. Lower-income households now account for 25% of all new businesses getting off the ground, up from 20% in 2020, the Bank of America Institute found.

"In a lot of ways, I think entrepreneurship is democratizing right now," said Angela Lee, co-director of the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School. "So I'm not at all surprised to see younger, lower-income founders start companies."

Experts attribute part of the surge in Gen Z founders to the advent of artificial intelligence, which is helping young people get their businesses off the ground by automating basic tasks and reducing startup costs.

"The barriers to entry are getting much lower," Lori Rosenkopf, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told CBS News. "It's pretty easy for anyone to start building some content, making themselves a content creator or doing a little bit of vibe coding."

AI can also help young business founders save money. Lee, a serial entrepreneur, said she paid roughly $15,000 for a single web developer when she started her first company.

"Now with AI, something that would have taken an app developer three months and $15,000, you can vibe code over the weekend," she said.

AI is integral to Herbert's company, which uses the technology to streamline information from health providers' notes, staff observations, lab results and other data. For example, Sync Labs' tech can "ambiently listen" to staff meetings when activated, creating a fuller picture of patient needs and offering clinically backed recommendations from the company's generative AI models, she said.

Herbert also said AI has been a "game changer" for daily operations at the San Francisco-based company, noting that it helps speed up tasks and reduce expenses. "As a startup, time is everything," she said. "We're trying to get our product out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible."

Today's challenging economic backdrop — and the rise of AI — also helps explain why more young Americans are choosing to launch their own businesses, experts said.

"There is a lot of job dislocation right now, and younger people are finding it hard to secure traditional employment given our current economic conditions," Wharton's Rosenkopf said.

Although U.S. unemployment remains low and job growth has been solid, research shows that recent college graduates are struggling to find work, especially as AI starts to automate certain functions normally reserved for entry-level workers. A recent ZipRecruiter survey of 1,000 recruiters found that 38% of employers have shifted basic data-processing tasks away from entry-level workers and onto AI.

Herbert said she didn't start Sync Labs due to concerns about the labor market, but noted that the stress of finding a job has weighed heavily on her friends.

"Being in this generation, it's probably one of the most talked about things," she said.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gen-z-business-applications-surge-ai/