Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portugal
While Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) potential for entrepreneurship is clear, the changes it brings to the New Venture Team’s (NVT) structure and composition remain nascent in academic literature. Drawing from the Dynamic Managerial Capabilities framework and through semi-structured interviews with AI technology-based NVT founders, we focus on the changes AI brings to NVT structure and composition. We find that while technical understanding of AI systems for non-technical team members is important, specialized AI domain expertise is crucial for high-impact outcomes. AI is blurring lines between roles, increasing the need for people with a general understanding of different areas. AI tools and workflow automation across operations replace single-layer jobs, bring significant efficiency and productivity gains, allow scaling with fewer workforce, and decrease the need for additional hires, especially in the early stages of product development. We find that the type of tasks AI can do depends on the context and purpose of the NVTs, contradicting what the literature has assumed so far. In deep AI technology-based new ventures, AI cannot yet execute many highly cognitively complex tasks and no roles are removed as the level of complexity overrides AI’s capabilities. On the other hand, in agile AI startups, the roles of entry-level junior positions are changing alongside the skills that are expected from them.
