April 23, 2026
Quentin Romero Lauro (SCI) is a clear example of the kind of innovation the School of Computing and Information (SCI) aims to cultivate. As the co-creator of BizChat, an AI-powered tool built to support small business owners in under-resourced communities, Romero Lauro's work blends technical skill with social awareness. Grounded in research and shaped by real community needs, Romero Lauro's path from student to entrepreneur reflects how SCI empowers students to build technology that is not only functional, but thoughtful, ethical, and impactful.
BizChat took shape through hands-on research rooted in real communities. While still a SCI student, Romero Lauro saw how learning happens through collaboration, partly by working directly with Pittsburgh entrepreneurs. Those insights shaped BizChat into a tool with a clear purpose: helping entrepreneurs turn ideas into usable business plans that support real goals, from gaining clarity to opening new professional doors.
"Being critical towards your productive use of AI is extremely important," Romero Lauro said. "It's like, am I adopting this just for the hype, or am I actually getting something out of it?"
The platform is intentionally built to support a wide array of digital literacy levels through features which support low barriers to entry, just-in-time learning, and contextual guidance that connects AI outputs to entrepreneurs' existing knowledge and goals. At the same time, BizChat encourages users to engage critically with AI by acknowledging its limitations, such as hallucinations and inaccuracies, and by fostering confidence through transparency and education. In doing so, the app reframes AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a tool that works best when embedded in community, context, and purpose. Specifically, Romero Lauro's work on BizChat focused not only on the design of BizChat to support entrepreneurs of diverse levels of digital literacy in adopting AI business planning tools, but how the context in which the tool was introduced influenced adoption.
"The design and the deployment of AI tools are not just about how the interface is structured and how the interface looks, but also the community and the context in which it is deployed in," Romero Lauro said.
BizChat began taking shape at Carnegie Mellon University, where Romero-Lauro collaborated with researcher Yasmine Kotturi on early studies exploring how small business owners rely on social support when adopting generative AI. SCI played a key role by giving Romero Lauro the academic flexibility to take a graduate-level HCI course as an undergraduate with SCI faculty member Aakash Gautam - an opportunity that allowed him to continue developing BizChat and pursue it as part of his coursework, bridging his work across both institutions. The project, which explored how entrepreneurs learn from one another rather than in isolation, served as a foundational precursor to BizChat and demonstrated how the intersection of rigorous research and human-centered design can yield tools that genuinely serve communities.
"Use these tools as aggressively as possible… I think that framing AI as cheating is completely counterproductive to where the future is going," Romero Lauro said.
Romero Lauro's research has earned significant recognition in the field. The BizChat paper was accepted to CHI in 2026, the top conference in human-computer interaction, and he will be presenting the work in Barcelona in April. A research internship at UC Berkeley yielded a paper that won Best Paper at CHI, one of the field's highest honors. He was also named a Finalist for the Computing Research Association's undergraduate research award in 2026, a highly competitive national recognition.
Through early exposure to research opportunities, Romero Lauro secured internships that connected him with collaborators who would continue mentoring him throughout college. He also credits the Pitt Computer Science Club (CSC), where he served as an officer, for helping him build the hands-on "builder" skills that were essential to bringing BizChat from concept to reality.
"I did [a] poster paper at CSCW and found that entrepreneurs in the Pittsburgh area were very reliant on each other for discovering new ways of using these systems," Romero Lauro explained.
These relationships helped Romero Lauro translate classroom research into long-term, real-world projects, reinforcing SCI's emphasis on collaboration, mentorship, and applied impact. Even after Romero Lauro stepped back from leading BizChat earlier this year, the project continued under the direction of other students, an outcome that reflects how SCI not only supports individual success but also fosters a culture where ideas can grow beyond one person and continue evolving within the academic community. While Romero Lauro is no longer directly overseeing BizChat's current development, the platform continues to live on as an evolving project maintained by a new group of students. For Romero Lauro, this continuity is meaningful in itself, it signals that the system was built with enough clarity and flexibility to be carried forward by others, even as its stewardship changes hands.
"A version of BizChat led by participants in their own spaces, like a garage or a different community center, would probably take on important differences shaped by that context," he said.
More importantly, BizChat's legacy lies in the tangible outcomes it enabled. Rather than replacing human judgment, BizChat functioned as a catalyst, helping entrepreneurs move faster, gain clarity, and make decisions they might not have reached as easily on their own.
Now based in San Francisco, Romero Lauro has transitioned from researching entrepreneurship to actively living it. Last fall, Romero Lauro started a Y Combinator-backed company focused on providing designers accessible tools to impact production software, inspired by his work on designing AI for users across levels of digital literacy, and developer tools. While BizChat continues under the leadership of other students, Romero Lauro remains focused on building products in the real world, applying the same community-aware and purpose-driven principles that shaped his research. For him, the future lies not only in studying how AI supports entrepreneurs, but in using those tools aggressively and creatively to build companies himself.