20775: Is AI Eating the Entrepreneurs? The Role of AI on the Entrepreneurial Process, Teams, and Decisions

Friday, July 25, 2025

14:30 - 17:30 CEST (GMT+2)

Location: Bella Center: Hall B- B2-m3

Session Type: PDW (workshop)
Orientation: Practice,Research
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/QGWaw6

Presenter(s)

AG

Alfonso Gambardella

Bocconi U., Italy

Speaker(s)

DH

David Hsu

The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania, United States

Presenter(s)

SI

Stephen Michael Impink

HEC Paris, France
MS

Mari Sako

U. of Oxford, United Kingdom
NW

Nataliya Wright

Columbia Business School, United States

Organizer(s)

MQ

Matthias Qian

ESMT Berlin, Germany

Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world.” Today, artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of this ongoing digital transformation, prompting a new question: Is AI now “eating the entrepreneurs?” This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) engages with the tectonic shifts that AI is bringing to entrepreneurship, spotlighting how AI-driven automation, data analytics, and generative tools could fundamentally alter the venture creation process. Sam Altman’s prediction of solo founders launching one-person “unicorns” underscores how AI might empower small teams—or even lone individuals—to achieve hyper-scale. At the same time, recent empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs could face lower direct exposure to AI-induced displacement, leaving room for augmented human decision-making under uncertainty (Knight, 1921) and enhanced leveraging of prior knowledge (Shane, 2000). Bringing together emerging scholarship and expert panelists, this PDW illuminates different key perspectives on AI’s transformative potential in the arena of entrepreneurship.