How Different Ecosystems view AI as A Drive For Entrepreneurship
Anthropic research reveals how Sub-Saharan Africa's ecosystem use AI as form of a bridge to use financial, human and social capital to drive entrepreneurship compared to North America and Europe.
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A while ago I wrote an essay about my philosophy of looking at AI not as a productivity tool or technology but as a type of capital.
I coined the term "Intelligence Capital".
The idea behind it is that startups look at 3 types of capital:
1) Financial Capital
2) Human Capital
3) Social Capital
In the essay I claimed that you can build "Intelligence Capital" with hiring the right people, and using the right models and tools to reduce headcount, cash burn and time to market.
Yesterday I saw Daniela Amodei's post where they shared the largest AI-driven interview of 80k+ people Anthropic ran amongst their users.
The "Top Visions" across different regions validated the fact that in ecosystem where there is lower risk capital, and less evolved ecosystem of entrepreneurship, people see greater vision in using AI as "Intelligence Capital".
In the Sub-Saharan Africa region, 16% of 1628 respondents saw AI as their mechanism to accelerate entrepreneurship and to bridge the gap in financial, human and social capital.
This is double than how AI is viewed in more advanced entrepreneurial ecosystems such as in North America where only 8.1% of 23,480 respondents saw it as a mechanism to drive entrepreneurship or as I call it Intelligence Capital. In Western Europe the vision for entrepreneurship was set for 8.2% amongst 15,134 respondents.
What we don't know is the share of the total responders of the 80,000 who are entrepreneurs or business owners, which might impact on their perception of the vision of AI.
It could be that the abundance of risk capital in the advanced ecosystem, there is such a great and powerful place for financial capital that people see it as a way to leverage capital to move faster.
We do see AI impacting how founders are building companies using AI as the option of being a solo-founder and bootstrapping your venture is rising. According to Carta, 38% of founders listed on Carta in 2024 were solo-founders with no VC money, compared to 32.3% in 2023. 17% were solo-founders were listed with VC money.
I believe that the idea of using AI as Intelligence Capital will grow over the years, but it looks like that grows in different pace in different ecosystem based on the problem it solves for founders and entrepreneurs.