Synthetic intelligence (AI) is seen as a brand new breeding floor for entrepreneurial alternatives. Whereas analysis agrees that AI has nice potential for financial progress, one query stays: How can AI be used for social good? A examine interviewed European entrepreneurs and located that the applying of AI for social entrepreneurship comes with each particular guarantees and perils. This weblog submit briefly summarises the important thing findings of the examine and supplies essential suggestions for start-ups.
How can AI be utilized for the larger good of society?
In at this time’s society, synthetic intelligence (AI) is an especially highly effective know-how that’s anticipated to generate a variety of improvements. These, in flip, make AI an instigator for an unprecedented degree of entrepreneurial alternative (Kabir 2018). However past this potential for financial progress, can AI even have a optimistic influence on society?
On this regard, researchers be aware that AI-based applied sciences might contribute to assuaging societal issues in numerous domains, together with equality and inclusion; schooling, well being, and starvation; or local weather motion (Tomašev et al. 2020). And but, the entrepreneurship literature doesn’t shed adequate mild so far on how entrepreneurial ventures can apply AI for the larger good of society.
Given our earlier analysis on (social) entrepreneurship (Scheidgen et al., 2021; Siebold et al., 2019) and synthetic intelligence (von Richthofen et al., 2021), we determined to discover this query in larger depth. In our current examine entitled “The Guarantees and Perils of Making use of AI For Social Good in Entrepreneurship,” we establish 4 important guarantees and perils related to making use of AI for social good in entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurial ventures apply AI for social good in quite a lot of domains
We sought out and performed interviews with founders and managers of 15 entrepreneurial ventures that efficiently apply AI for social good in all types of domains: from agriculture and banking to schooling, environmental companies, and healthcare. For instance, one enterprise used picture recognition and classification in addition to object detection and localization to establish, categorize, and map plastic waste. One other enterprise supplied a cellular app to farmers in growing international locations and used picture recognition and classification to detect plant illnesses, pests, and soil deficiencies. A 3rd enterprise used picture recognition and classification to digitize medical photographs and develop purposes for medical evaluation and prognosis.
The Guarantees of venturing with AI for social good
Our examine identifies 4 notable guarantees of venturing with AI for social good:
The Perils of venturing with AI for social good
Our examine reveals that founders keen on venturing with AI for social good should discover methods to deal with 4 important perils:
What are the implications for entrepreneurs?
The number of circumstances reported on this examine ought to encourage entrepreneurs to use AI to societal challenges. We provide entrepreneurs 4 key insights from our examine that may assist them use AI for social good. First, entrepreneurs want to beat a belief hole as they take care of systematic bias and use techniques affected by the black-box downside whereas aiming to ship difficult-to-measure outcomes. Second, entrepreneurs have to handle useful resource shortage as they face the problem of securing scarce technological expertise. Third, entrepreneurs can interact in holistic venturing once they leverage structural flexibility to collaborate with a number of stakeholders from each the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Lastly, entrepreneurs can leverage the affordances of AI to create large-scale influence by means of break-through progress, customization at scale, or a mix of each.
Conclusion
Regardless of AI’s growing relevance, there’s a paucity of analysis on how AI can be utilized to profit society – particularly in regard to entrepreneurship. We hope that our examine can make clear the applicability of AI for optimistic societal change in methods that may assist alleviate grand challenges in a variety of domains, together with equality and inclusion, schooling, well being, starvation, and local weather motion.