AI optimism is concentrated among founders with growth and job-creation ambitions

GEM UK's latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data identifies what its researchers call an "AI gap": entrepreneurs with growth and job-creation ambitions are substantially more optimistic about AI than the wider UK entrepreneur population. The finding comes from the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick Business School, which has run GEM UK annually since 1999.

That gap says less about AI's merits than about who has the opportunity to test it. Growth oriented founders tend to have more capital, more hires, and more repeatable processes worth automating: exactly the conditions where AI tools show the fastest return.

Founders running leaner, more bespoke operations often lack that headroom, so the same tools cost configuration time without an obvious payoff. Perhaps this highlights a resourcing gap, not increased optimism, where the best-resourced founders are more likely to experiment with AI.

Conversely, ambitions for rapid growth might naturally incentivise the kind of founder who is disposed to trying new tools. Therefore, GEM's data shows growth and AI at work, hand-in-hand

If growth isn't your primary goal, don't let any scepticism about AI tools detract from potential benefits. A better approach is to benchmark one task (or a series of tasks) against a tool before disqualifying it. If you run a founder programme or accelerator, treat this as an opportunity for promoting AI among the founders least likely to seek it out themselves, not the ones already sold.

Share this with a founder who's written AI off because scaling was never the plan.