The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance

Scalable and low-cost AI assistance has the potential to improve firm decision-making and economic performance, particularly in emerging markets. However, running a business involves a wide range of open-ended problems, making it unclear whether and how recent advances in AI can help business owners around the world make better decisions. In a field experiment with Kenyan entrepreneurs, we evaluated the impact of AI advice on small business revenues and profits by randomizing access to a GPT- 4-powered AI business assistant. While we are unable to reject the null hypothesis of no average treatment effect on firm revenues and profits, we find that the effect for entrepreneurs who were low-performing at baseline is nearly 0.25 standard deviations lower than for initial high performers. Subsample analyses show that low performers did nearly 10% worse due to the AI assistant, whereas high performers may have benefited by over 15%. This differential impact does not appear to result from differences in the questions posed to or the advice received from the AI, but rather from which pieces of AI advice entrepreneurs selected and implemented. More broadly, these results show that generative AI is already capable of impacting real-world business performance— though in uneven and sometimes unexpected ways.