DME Seminar - Less A, More I: How nascent entrepreneurs regulate the human-AI cognitive boundary to protect agency and authorship

Presenter: Yihan Deng and Professor Mark Healey

Title: Less A, More I: How nascent entrepreneurs regulate the human-AI cognitive boundary to protect agency and authorship

Abstract:

Generative AI now sits inside the daily work of venture creation, yet how nascent entrepreneurs govern its place in their thinking and action remains poorly understood. Drawing on interviews with 42 founders in a UK deep-tech accelerator, this study develops a grounded model of AI use as boundary regulation. Our findings show that founders did not simply augment or automate with AI. Rather, they drew, policed, and continually adjusted a boundary between the cognitive work they delegated and the work they kept, through four interrelated practices of defining, distributing, monitoring, and controlling. At the centre of this boundary sits a protected core, the origination of ideas and the ownership of judgement, which founders reserved regardless of the technology’s capability. The model reveals patterns that existing accounts of AI use do not anticipate. Placement of tasks was conditioned on the founder’s own competence, so that delegation deepened where expertise allowed verification and tightened where it did not. Yet founders were most confident in AI outputs precisely where their knowledge was thinnest, a knowledge paradox that inverts the logic of complementarity underpinning much of the AI-as-augmentation literature. Boundary adjustment was triggered from within, as founders responded to a felt weakening of their own reasoning by pulling work back across the boundary. The study provides a new view of entrepreneur–AI complementarity as an ongoing regulatory accomplishment rather than a fixed division of labour, suggesting that entrepreneurial judgement is protected not by limiting the use of generative AI but by regulating its place within entrepreneurial cognition.

Speakers Biography:

Yihan Deng is a third-year PhD researcher at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester. Her doctoral research examines how nascent entrepreneurs regulate the boundary between their own cognition and generative AI during venture creation.

Mark Healey is Professor of Strategic Management at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK. Mark’s research focuses on cognition and emotion in organizations, particularly how they enable and constrain strategic adaptation. His research has appeared in leading academic journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and Strategic Management Journal. Mark has received funding for his research from the Economic and Social Research Council, The British Academy, and the private sector. Mark’s research has featured in various business periodicals, including The Financial Times, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review. He received his Ph.D. in Management Sciences from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).