Beyond the GenAI gold rush: Mapping entrepreneurial tensions in the age of generative artificial intelligence

Abstract

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) emerges as the latest technological gold rush, this preliminary study examines how entrepreneurs made sense of this transformative moment in the early months of ChatGPT. Through semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs adopting GenAI, observations of AI creators in Silicon Valley, and computational analysis of our qualitative data, as well as Twitter discourse, we reveal a complex reality beneath the media hype. While Twitter discourse initially showed entrepreneurs aligning with techno-optimistic expectations of their imagined audience, our ethnographic data exposed deeper tensions around job displacement, bias, privacy, alignment, and the more significant ethical and societal implications. The contrast between publicly oriented Twitter data and self-reflective ethnographic data exemplifies the complex ways that entrepreneurs wrestle with their identity as innovators—a tension between public displays of optimism and internal grappling with uncertainty around AI. Drawing on Madsen et al.’s concept of productive friction, we employ this framework in two complementary ways: as an analytical lens for understanding entrepreneurs’ cognitive dissonance and as a methodological principle that deliberately generates tensions through the use of traditional and computational approaches. We argue that these contradictions serve as constructive catalysts for more thoughtful innovation and adoption of Gen AI by forcing critical examination of assumptions and practices. Our mixed-methods approach, therefore, demonstrates a way to capture, analyze, and understand emerging productive frictions surrounding implications for entrepreneurship while contributing to emerging techno-anthropological discourse and approaches for studying technological transformation.