AI-Enabled Entrepreneurship: A Review Based on the Structural Topic Model

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal force in empowering entrepreneurial development, which plays an increasingly important role in its opportunity discovery and creation, resource integration, and value creation. Although attention and research interest in AI within entrepreneurship research have grown substantially, existing studies remain dispersed and lack systematic integration. This study adopts an unsupervised machine-learning approach, Structural Topic Model (STM), which combines automated coding with manual coding, to analyze 122 articles retrieved from the Web of Science. This study maps the current landscape of research on AI-enabled entrepreneurship across its antecedents, contextual settings, processes, outcomes, theoretical lenses, and methodological tools. The analysis reveals six areas requiring further inquiry: (1) deepening the study of motivational mechanisms, (2) enriching research on contextual fields, (3) exploring pathway mechanisms more thoroughly, (4) examining the positive and negative effects of AI empowerment, (5) breaking new ground in underlying theoretical logic, and (6) integrating diverse technological approaches. Building on these insights, it proposes a future research framework and agenda that (1) investigates the motivation of AI-enabled entrepreneurship in the macro, meso, micro, and cross-level scales; (2) conducts multi-contextual studies spanning regions, industries, and domains; (3) analyzes process pathways from cross-level and dynamic perspectives; (4) attends comprehensively to both positive outcomes and potential negatives of AI-enabled entrepreneurship; and (5) develops a distinctive theoretical system grounded in emerging practices, supported by robust data, tools, and methods. By synthesizing the extant literature and outlining this framework, this study offers a reference for enriching and deepening research on AI-enabled entrepreneurship.

Keywords

artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning / structural topic model (STM) / entrepreneurship

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Higher Education Press