🌟 Grantee spotlight: In February 2023, Nick Otis was part of the South Park Commons-The Agency Fund Social Impact Fellowship. A year later, his team has published a paper and is planning to scale the research.

The researchers developed an AI “mentor” for Kenyan entrepreneurs using…

GenAI shows potential for aiding small business growth, but a Kenyan entrepreneur study reveals constraints. The randomized control trial was led by Nick Otis, David Holtz and Solene Delecourt of Haas with Rem Koning and Rowan Clarke of Harvard University. #genAI

haas.org/49mwprh

Immense thanks to the #PAC11 team and Wharton People Analytics judges for awarding our paper The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance first prize, and for the seamless and engaging conference! Full paper available here: bit.ly/42VLTRD

Fantastic podcast with VoxDev and @orgrem discussing our field experiment on how generative AI is reshaping entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Big thank you to VoxDev! Read the paper: bit.ly/42VLTRD Listen to the podcast: bit.ly/3wlC4Ac

I’d like to see more studies of how AI is being used internationally, now that GPT-4 class models are available in 169+ countries (including for free)

There is a lot of work in the US & Europe. I have seen 2 nice studies in Africa (teacher & entrepreneur mentoring👇). What else?

AI is fast. Automation is slow. Can they meet?

New s*bst@ck with shoutouts to new work from Nick Otis, Bob Sutton, Andrew McAfee 🇺🇦, Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock.

wildworldofwork.org/p/ai-is-fast-a…

This interesting study seems to suggest that top performing firms use generative AI differently/better than do low-performing organizations, within their context. Interesting possible reasons (NB. Not the usual academic-research-cum-user-review on latest version of ChatGPT.)

Interesting paper, likely one of the first to study the impact of AI assistance tools among small businesses in the context of developing countries. will read it in detail, but this part of tldr stands out. I believe task mining and discovery will be an important focus area -…

관찰된 현상은 능력치가 높은 사람들은 LLM에게 쉬운 일을 시키고, 능력치가 낮은 사람들은 LLM에게 어려운 일을 시킴. 즉 'LLM 활용 스킬' 자체에서 차이나기 때문에 이런 역설적인 결과가 나타난 것. x.com/daveholtz/stat…

But the main finding is actually quite huge. There is a lot of research on how to raise entrepreneurial performance, and it usually requires costly mentoring & teaching resources.

But the best founders got a 20% improvement from using GPT-4 for advice alone. Big implications.

Cool new study where entrepreneurs in Kenya were given access to AI mentors. This is different than other studies as the AI was limited to advice, not doing.

High performers got a big 20% boost to performance, but low performers took a hit as they could not implement the advice.

🚨New working paper! 'The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance'

osf.io/preprints/osf/…

with a badass team Nick Otis Rowan Clarke David Holtz Rem Koning ❤️❤️❤️❤️

CRITICAL new findings on genAI impact in entrepreneurship.

Abstract says it all: business that were already doing well get a 20% boost. Businesses that were struggling saw a 10% *decrement*.

That's right. It hurt them.

And we know a bit about why. More research needed.