Elevating entrepreneurship with generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) transforms the entrepreneurial landscape by providing contextual information, identifying viable opportunities, and facilitating entrepreneurial decision-making. Despite the growing acknowledgment of its use in entrepreneurial activities, this field lacks a robust theoretical framework and practical implementation. This study seeks to fill this gap by drawing on information behavior literature to explore the effect of GenAI across the entrepreneurial spectrum. By leveraging large language models and prompt engineering patterns, we examined how GenAI could generate accurate, relevant, and inspiring content through various interaction scenarios. Our findings suggest that GenAI significantly mitigates early-stage entrepreneurial information asymmetry and supports sophisticated problem-solving when coupled with appropriate domain knowledge and prompt engineering techniques. However, GenAI's task complexity limits its use in late-stage entrepreneurial exploitation activities. Finally, this study provides insight into research avenues and practical applications.