Capability Without a Team : How Solopreneurs Perceive the Business Impact of AI Across Product-Risk Contexts

Sammanfattning

Abstract Background: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a central enabling technology in entrepreneurial activity, reshaping how individuals identify opportunities, execute work, and compete in digital markets. Solopreneurs, individuals operating a business without partners or permanent employees, represent a structurally distinct case: a single person carries every function a firm would otherwise distribute across roles. Existing research on AI in entrepreneurship has concentrated on firms and on consumer responses to AI-generated content, leaving the producer-side perspective of solopreneurs themselves largely unexamined. Purpose: This study examines and compares how solopreneurs perceive the business impact of AI across low and high product-risk contexts, with a focus on how the credibility stakes of their offering shape the perceived benefits, risks, and boundaries of AI integration. Method: We adopt an interpretivist philosophy and abductive approach, operationalized as a qualitative comparative case study. Fourteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with solopreneurs in seven countries across both low and high product-risk contexts. Data were analyzed using Template Analysis, with Dynamic Capabilities, Liability of Smallness, and Perceived Risk Theory functioning as sensitizing frameworks. Cross-case comparison across five aggregate dimensions identified shared mechanisms and contextual divergences. Conclusion: AI mechanisms operate similarly across both contexts, but the meaning, stakes, and boundaries attached to those mechanisms differ systematically with the credibility stakes of the offering. Solopreneurs in low product-risk contexts experience AI as a practical capability lever for execution, scalability, and market entry. In high product-risk contexts, they experience AI as a conditional resource requiring expertise, supervision, and active credibility management. We name this pattern contextual moderation: shared mechanisms whose stakes differ by context. The study extends Dynamic Capabilities, Liability of Smallness, and Perceived Risk Theory to the Solopreneurial context, and offers solopreneurs and entrepreneurship support actors a framework for judging when AI integration adds genuine value at the individual level.