Xiaohai: This issue shares an article published in the Journal of Business Venturing on the relationship between artificial intelligence and entrepreneurs. This article describes the entrepreneurial opportunities brought by AI and introduces the impact of AI on entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial behavior. This paper proposes that artificial intelligence can be organically combined with entrepreneurs to explore the application prospects of AI-entrepreneurial "super tools".
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to machines trained to perform tasks related to human intelligence, interpret external data, learn from external data, and use the learned knowledge to flexibly adapt to the task to achieve specific outcomes. This article briefly explains AI and looks to the future to highlight some of the broader and longer-term societal impacts of AI.
Entrepreneurship is a tool used to create productive, unproductive and destructive outputs (Baumol, 1996). Combining AI with the entrepreneurial process could provide a "super tool" with the potential to lead to more diverse outcomes. When people don't know how to use tools, tools can lead to devastating consequences. Therefore, a broad understanding of AI and entrepreneurship can help drive their use towards more productive outcomes, away from disruptive outcomes, and prepare entrepreneurs for a role to play in monitoring and quickly addressing unintended consequences.
This paper proposes that artificial intelligence can be combined with entrepreneurship to form a "super tool". Academics can study the link between AI and entrepreneurship to explore the possibilities of this potential AI-entrepreneurial "super tool" and hopefully use it in the entrepreneurial process.
Artificial intelligence has aroused great interest among entrepreneurs
AI is widely used for a variety of purposes, which will expand with the development of AI. We provide Table 1 to show the scope of current and future AI. Table 1 (adapted from Kaplan and Haenlein, 2019) provides examples of AI (at different levels of development) in four sectors (customer service, finance, healthcare, and higher education).
In the field of customer service, AI has been used to send personalized messages to customers, automatically respond to customer queries (using chatbots), respond to customers' adverse emotional reactions to improve customer experience (through facial recognition), tailor services (e.g., using bots that speak most languages), and ultimately improve delivery speed (by predicting purchases) and security (e.g., through voiceprints).
Entrepreneurs can identify and build opportunities to enhance customer service through AI-based products. They can also use these products to learn more about customer needs (as a source of new opportunities); Improve business operations in terms of speed, customization, quality and reliability; Reduce payment risk with more secure payment methods.
In finance, AI is being used to detect and respond to financial fraud, identify investment opportunities in financial markets, and customize risk assessments.
In healthcare, AI is being used in diagnostics, treatment recommendations, treatment outcome prediction, and robotics (e.g., robots that perform surgery) and can enhance compassion in healthcare by improving the scale and scope of customized rapid responses.
In higher education, AI enhances the student learning experience through virtual teaching assistants, personalized learning programs and interventions, and improved teacher performance. Similarly, entrepreneurs can develop AI products for the education industry. Entrepreneurship professors have the opportunity to adopt new AI-based educational services that provide exceptional learning experiences for quality, emerging, and current entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurial opportunities brought about by artificial intelligence
Take advantage of emotional-economic opportunities
Future advances in AI in the emotional economy will include recognizing, communicating, and responding to emotions. First, future AI will more effectively identify human-generated emotions, using a large database of text/visual emotions from physical sensors and personal devices to collect physiological data on the emotions of oneself and others. Second, future AI will incorporate more emotions, enhance communication by using physical sensors and personal devices to provide physiological data about one's own and others' emotions (Franzoni et al., 2019), and learn from advances in emotion recognition to improve communication. Finally, advances in AI in recognizing and communicating emotions will enable robots to improve the quality of human life by forming stronger human-machine connections, showing empathy during patient recovery, and improving communication for training and education purposes, including education about emotions. As a result, future AI will provide stronger emotional connections between humans and machines, as well as between people.
Despite the enormous potential of AI in the future, machines do not yet possess human sensory, emotional, and social skills (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2019; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021)。 The entrepreneurial process is a typical emotional roller coaster (Shepherd, 2003; Shepherd and Cardon, 2009), so entrepreneurs must understand and regulate their own and others' emotions to make good decisions and manage relationships with key stakeholders to ensure access to necessary resources (Cardon et al., 2012). Therefore, entrepreneurship can provide human touch, emotion, and high-quality relationships to enhance AI, enhance decision-making capabilities and effectively implement AI.
Opportunities to reconfigure career skills
AI transforms businesses by creating opportunities to create value for users. Experts expect that the adoption of AI will lead to relatively small job losses. Zanzotto (2019) is currently controversial about this, as the activities recommended by AI tools still need to be carried out by humans. However, human activity will be different, which will cause some people to have to change careers, while others will have to change the way they perform tasks, work with and interact with AI systems. For example, the McKinsey Global Initiative report (2018) describes the consensus among experts that AI will affect 30% of activities in 60% of occupations, and that by 2030, 4-800 million workers are expected to be in jobs that are very different from today, and 5.5-890 million new jobs will be created.
Create opportunities for new governance mechanisms
As AI transforms society, entrepreneurs will need to monitor and influence how AI is governed. Zuboff (2019) describes how artificial intelligence poses a threat to our economy. AI creates monopolies that control the information we see and the products we buy. Therefore, it is necessary to develop regulations on monopoly issues. In particular, regulations are needed to control how AI systems are trained and tested, but need to focus on the process of generating AI while allowing (unknown) future AI applications to continue.
Another governance mechanism that oversees and guides the development of AI is the activism of the AI community. The AI community includes "researchers, research engineers, teachers, graduate students, NGO workers, activists, and a broader range of tech workers." This community adopts "a broad framework of social and political activism, organizational and advocacy issues, agenda setting, standards setting; private discussions with decision-makers; public outreach on traditional and social media; Establishment of new fields and organizations; subject to government investigations; and classic labor tactics of resistance and strikes" (Bellfield, 2020: 15). This situation presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to develop and monitor third-party governance mechanisms.
An opportunity for humanity to keep the cycle in a long time
The future of AI and society is not AI replacing the work humans do, but enhancing it by providing complementary input to the tasks performed by humans, i.e. "putting humans in the loop". An entrepreneur considering an AI system needs to consider the needs of the people using the AI system. Ultimately, entrepreneurs have the opportunity to use AI to create systems that support the ability of others to complete critical tasks more efficiently.
Expand human opportunities in developing AI tools
The relationship between humans and AI replaces simply executing AI recommendations. Data collection and data management for AI tools are decided by humans. This provides an opportunity for entrepreneurs to help expand the range of careers involved in this selection process. Entrepreneurs can help ensure that those best placed to make these judgments are properly engaged. The machine will process any data for training purposes, but the data may be inappropriate, accurate, unethical, or context-sensitive (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021). This data processing requires entrepreneurs to be familiar with the data sets available, as well as the conditions under which each dataset is obtained, which data is not included, and whether this data will expose these entrepreneurs (and others) to additional security and privacy concerns. While the enforcement of data sales standards is not yet mature, entrepreneurs need to understand the regulations and ethics associated with the collection, use, and dissemination of data used and generated in AI.
Opportunities to expand the use of AI tools
Since machines do not yet have a sense of purpose or intent, the first choice for entrepreneurs is to define the goals of AI in a way that is both ethical and appropriate to the limitations of AI (Raisch & Krakowski, 2021). From a practical perspective, in the context of AI, entrepreneurs will need to change the way they conceptualize "purpose" to include responsibility and accountability for generating AI and its use and continued evolution, including future regulation. Given the causal uncertainty of how AI produces outcomes, how AI systems change as new data is added (which can quickly outdate any initial understanding), and the potential for unintended consequences from using AI, this responsibility and accountability is critical but also challenging.
文献来源：Dean A. Shepherd, Ann Majchrzak. (2022). Machines augmenting entrepreneurs: Opportunities (and threats) at the Nexus of artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship[J]. Journal of Business Venturing, (37), 106227.
Details of entrepreneurship policy