Impact on Entrepreneurship

Impact on Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship in all its forms is what is expected to change the fortunes of many young people in a world that is increasingly starving for jobs. In India, the government has launched a campaign to motivate young people to be job givers rather than job seekers through its flagship initiatives ‘Startup India Standup India’ and Start up Village Entrepreneurship Programme. Indeed, many thousands of people have chosen entrepreneurship and its excitement instead of settling for a mundane job. A case in point is The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) in the western city of Pune, where a group of over eighty seasoned entrepreneurs have taken on the mandate of supporting hundreds of entrepreneur aspirants with a series of programmes that encourage them, provide them learning opportunities and nurture them to success. TiE has chapters all over the country and many parts of the world, prominently the United States of America, and has proved to be a major driving force for entrepreneurship, particularly in new opportunity areas. AI has proved to be both an enabler of new entrepreneurship and a source of an enormous wave of emerging entrepreneurship opportunities for generations of aspiring start-ups.

To consider the second opportunity first, in a small city like Dubai, where we had the opportunity in November 2024 to meet the Minister for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications and visit the newly constructed AI campus in the Dubai International Finance Centre, it was amazing to see the process by which new AI ideas are being identified and nurtured with mentors, business users and capital to enable scaling. In many cities of India as well, AI figures in the business plan of multiple start-ups who see this opportunity as the holy grail to build products and services and attract venture capital. A majority of investments in start-ups in the last two years have been in AI, and AI extensions have happened in a very high number of start-ups who have pivoted their model to include the new capabilities provided by AI. AI is also finding its way into the value proposition of many businesses focused on education, healthcare, financial services, agriculture, manufacturing and other application areas.

Given its ability to take clean data and create actionable insights, it will surely become an indispensable part of the toolkit for any entrepreneur in virtually every start-up area. AI also helps entrepreneurs to keep their costs low by automating many tasks ranging from bookkeeping and coding of applications to more complicated value additions like AI-powered chatbots for customer support and engagement in many reactive and proactive formats. Many large firms have already started incorporating AI into their product feature sets. Examples are virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, Einstein for Salesforce and AI add-ons to the marketing automation platform HubSpot, accounting software QuickBooks and investment platform AngelList.

AI has its downsides for entrepreneurs too, since it can create over-dependence on technology and build bias in the analysis of situations encountered in the process of serving customers. As we have repeated many times, the lurking fear of data privacy violations and cybersecurity cannot be underlined more, and entrepreneurs will have to take all precautions to ensure that their fledgling enterprise does not get derailed by unanticipated legal issues. There could also be regulatory issues since laws pertaining to AI are still in discussion within the governments of various countries.