AI-Powered Ecosystem Building?

Distilling the themes of this week’s Global Entrepreneurship Congress was easy: ecosystem-building and AI. Every single session I attended mentioned them both, and Mark Cuban’s closing keynote was both giddy and a bit menacing: it’s amazing! If you’re not using it, you’re going to die! Which has me wondering…imagine if AI turbo-charged ecosystem building. What would that look like? Our colleague Ubaldo Córdova Figueroa took us on a tour of AI-powered Strategic Doing last year (check out the video), thinking through how it could change the workshop experience. What else could it do?

The ESHIP Alliance‘s half-day workshop at the conference brought together ecosystem-building enablers and invited AI right into the room. Executive director Andy Stoll asked each of us to feed a few prompts about our work into an AI interface, and just a few hours later, it kicked back a customized webpage for every person (~80 of us) in the room. Its reframing of the Lab’s work (not just mine, though that’s also true) was solid:

The Lab has had the privilege to work with Andy in several venues over the last decade and we share his passion for “mass collaboration.” This next leg of the journey feels both exciting and a little anxiety-producing…but that’s the nature of complex challenges. You can see the desired future (if indistinctly) but the road from here to there is anything but clear, and you know it’s full of potholes, switchbacks, and dead-ends that will make you re-think and try again. Can AI help smooth out the road? Maybe in part, but the habits and skills of collaboration can’t be outsourced: asking good questions, building psychological safety, using micro-commitments to build trust, etc. AI is (just) an asset, big as it is.

AI promises to be – already is – a revolutionary, game-changing addition to all kinds of endeavors, including ecosystem-building. That will mean much more than helping communities or regions build AI-based companies or teaching AI skills. There will be such a thing as AI-powered ecosystem building, and we get to co-create it with everyone else on the ride. We’re in…and as a friend likes to say, “buckle up!”