Join us for an ERIM research seminar
Abstract
Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a tool that entrepreneurs use. Increasingly, AI systems generate ideas, evaluate opportunities, advise founders, and act with growing autonomy in entrepreneurial processes. AI is thus becoming an actor, or co-actor, in entrepreneurship. This shift moves theory and research on entrepreneurial AI from the periphery to the center of the field: if AI systems participate in recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities, we need to understand how they do so, how this compares with human entrepreneurial cognition and action, and what follows for founders, ventures, and ecosystems. In this talk, I present recent approaches from my research program on entrepreneurial AI. These include work on LLM-based entrepreneurial agents, behavioral studies of how role and persona prompting shape AI output, and new methods that look inside AI models to examine how entrepreneurship-related constructs are internally represented and can be causally manipulated. I discuss what these approaches reveal, where their limits lie, and which new perspectives and open questions they raise for entrepreneurship theory, research methods, and practice.
