Daniels professors say entrepreneurs are naturally suited to use artificial intelligence and push its development forward
Neil Pollard
Leo Dixon
When Leo Dixon thinks of AI, he sees Star Trek’s Holodeck. Members of the crew can enter a room of 3D simulations and immediately put themselves in any location or with a hologram of any person.
The technology, obviously, isn’t there yet, but Dixon, a teaching assistant professor in the Daniels College of Business Department of Business Information & Analytics, has begun to study the use and development of artificial intelligence, particularly as it relates to entrepreneurship.
Dixon has been partnering with Neil Pollard, a teaching professor in the Office of Entrepreneurship, to conduct an extensive review of the ways entrepreneurs are utilizing AI. In an interview with the Daniels Newsroom, Dixon and Pollard explain how entrepreneurs can naturally integrate the technology and how they can stay on top of the latest trends.
I’ve always associated new technology and technological breakthrough with entrepreneurship. Is there a history between AI and entrepreneurship already?
Neil Pollard: It’s hard to say. What was AI and what is AI now, as of this time last year, is completely different. If you characterize entrepreneurial firms as small, nimble, resource-constrained companies, then access to artificial intelligence and really extreme levels of computing power was just inaccessible because they just didn’t have the resources to access it. But now, with this new wave of generative AI, it’s crazy accessible. [It costs] pennies to do some really incredible things. My contention would be that this is the first big opportunity for small and even medium-sized firms to access tools that were reserved for only big firms like IBM and Google.
Leo Dixon: Entrepreneurship and innovation have always been married together. But AI is the next wave of things. As Neil mentioned, the definition has changed since last year. Even Microsoft, for example, has different kinds of certifications and trainings. I think three times this year they changed the definitions of different kinds of AI for their AI certifications. It’s going to hit a point where entrepreneurs are going to be able to take it the way they can take any other innovation; we’re not quite there yet. We’re still in that early adoption phase, but we’ll get there soon.
Entrepreneurship is known as a fast-moving industry. Entrepreneurs are known as nimble, agile people. Are they a natural match for AI?
Pollard: If we can get entrepreneurs to the point where they understand that the barrier to entry is lower, then I think it is a nice natural fit because we can divert some of those resources that we spent on expensive things to sustain our companies to other things. On the positive side, it’s a really beautiful marriage. On the negative side, we’re really worried about where those people go who used to do these tasks.
Dixon: How an entrepreneur uses AI will be different than most people. A regular person may go on ChatGPT to play with it, but they don’t really have to. With limited resources and all the capabilities of what AI can do, the entrepreneur has more on the line in terms of how quick they can do things or how accurately they can do things. Being able to utilize AI will match with the entrepreneur more than most people, [at least] in the beginning, until people become less afraid and start adopting it more and more to their lives. But it will be the entrepreneurs that push for that to happen—which is what entrepreneurs are known for doing: sparking innovation and letting everyone see what more you can do with it.
Your research focuses on three big ways AI can be employed, breaking it down into the categories “assist, augment, automate.” How do you define those three buckets?
Pollard: When you’re automating things, you’re taking these routinized, mundane tasks out of the hands of people. You can train AI on what you want it to do and have it make decisions. One example could be a chatbot, where we log on to a website and we’re asking questions and it automates the process. The customer gets their questions answered, it might not matter if it’s a human being answering or a machine.
Augmenting is more looking at a scenario or a task and trying to extrapolate data to make a decision. There may be deeply engrained patterns in sales data that they should make a decision on, but they can’t make it with the naked eye, so they need some assistance.
Dixon: I look at assistance as technology we have now (email, cellphones). These things work on their own; we partner with them. AI can assist what we’re doing but the phone is not a part of you yet. I would consider ChatGPT as an assistant because it isn’t part of you. It does some things for me but it’s not with me or in me.
Assistance is human plus AI, where as augmentation is more like human times AI.
Pollard: And then automation is AI instead of humans altogether.
How should entrepreneurs think about integrating AI to become and remain competitive?
Dixon: They have to get an education first. They need to understand what AI actually is to understand how to take advantage of it. Before they can even think, “What does my strategy look like?” they [need to be] properly educated.
Pollard: The lowest-hanging fruit are big companies that are going to use AI tools to help us automate. For example, QuickBooks already has some of these tools built in. A transaction comes in and it sees it’s from Xcel Energy, it can classify it as a utility bill. If companies are able to structure some of those tools to automate some of those tasks, I don’t have to do anything new or learn anything. It’s just going to start doing those things for me and free me up to do other stuff.
You spent months reviewing literature and studying how AI is used in entrepreneurship. Was there one big surprise or takeaway from what you found?
Dixon I was expecting to see more ways that the value of AI is [already] there. What we found was more theoretical, that it should benefit entrepreneurs.
Pollard: Our original research question was: “How do entrepreneurs adopt AI tools to make themselves more efficient and competitive?” And we had to change “how do they” to “how might they” because they’re not. Something that was illuminating is that there’s a handful of companies steering the ship and entrepreneurs, by nature, are small, so they just have to take the tools that are being developed for them.
Dixon: No one knows how to think about AI from a strategic perspective, unless you’re one of the big companies with billions of dollars for [research and development]. Small businesses are just trying to make that first sale and their first dollar. So how do you think about that plus this new technology that you don’t even know if it’s worth it?
How should an entrepreneur stay on top of the latest adaptations and changes when AI is changing so quickly?
Dixon: I think that’s a hard answer because it’s changing so fast. They really have to zone in on their industry and keep up with how their industry is being affected by AI. It’s too much to think about AI on a higher level, too much to try to follow what Bard is doing or ChatGPT. That to me will take the entrepreneur off the path.
Pollard: I don’t think firms need to necessarily actively be seeking to employ AI tools and strategies today. Just take some free courses; they’re all over the place. Learn about some of the terminology and how some companies are automating some of these tasks. Some entrepreneurs might say, “I don’t have time for that.” Well you’re about to have time for that if you don’t take some time to learn, because you’ll be done.
As you look into the future of AI, what question are you most eager to have answered?
Dixon: For me, I think of Star Trek and the Holodeck. You walk into a room and it’s all of a sudden transformed into this world and you’re surrounded with these fictional beings that you can interact with and they can actually interact back at you. I think that’s what I’m waiting for. I’m looking forward to that true augmentation of AI in society, where you don’t have to put on a headset to be transported to a different world.
Pollard: They say if AI was a human it would be like a six- or seven-year-old right now, and in a couple of years it will be 20. And in a couple of years it will be 30. If you think about it as a person, you can’t do much with a six- or seven-year-old right now as far as making decisions for your company. But you get a 20-year-old or a 30- or 40-year-old that can help make decisions? I think one other big question is how much is going to be too much? You can’t undo stuff. It’s fun to dream up all of the exciting things it could do, but what are some of the unintended consequences that emerge because of it? What are the things that get us to the point of, “Oh we went too far?”