AI as Co-Creator: Fostering Social Equity Towards Social Sustainability in Entrepreneurial Development for Women and Minority Entrepreneurs

Latha Poonamallee, PhD
Professor of Management & Social Innovation
School of Design Strategies
Parsons School of Design
The New School

This paper examines how artificial intelligence (AI) can act as a co-creation partner to foster social equity leading to social sustainability by addressing persistent barriers faced by women and minority entrepreneurs. We develop a theoretical framework integrating social capital theory and the resource-based view to analyze how AI can systematically address resource gaps across structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions while serving as a strategic capability that enables competitive advantage. Modern AI systems including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity represent practical technologies already operational for everyday entrepreneurs through accessible platforms, low-cost subscriptions, and no-code tools enabling workflow automation with minimal technical skill. While prior work has explored how social capital creates competitive advantages, little research explains how AI technologies specifically enhance both social capital development and resource-based competitive advantage simultaneously for ventures of underrepresented entrepreneurs. This study explicitly identifies the entrepreneurial venture as the unit of analysis and articulates five testable propositions on AI’s influence across structural, relational, and cognitive capital, clarifying mechanisms by which AI functions as a technological mediator that democratizes access to both network resources and strategic capabilities for underrepresented founders. Using AI-generated hypotheticals from Los Angeles demonstrating replicable processes with current technologies like retrieval-augmented generation and cloud AI workspaces, we show that AI-enhanced social capital can reduce venture development disparities while generating distinctive advantages for strategically adopting entrepreneurs. The framework requires empirical validation through longitudinal studies and acknowledges dependencies on infrastructure, ecosystem support, and cultural context, ultimately reconceptualizing AI as an active partner, illustrating that equity and competitive excellence are complementary and achievable through deliberate AI-enabled social capital development.

Dr. Latha Poonamallee is a Professor of Management & Social Innovation in the School of Design Strategies in the New School Parsons School of Design.

She works on two major research areas both focused on how management, organizations, and leadership can be vehicles to create a more sustainable, prosperous, just, and equitable world. She is the Founder and Director of Management and Social Justice Collective that has convened thousands of people from over 66 countries since its inception in 2020. The collective welcomes submissions and proposals to the 2026 Management and Social Justice Conference to be hosted in New York between April 29-May 1, 2026. The theme is Entrepreneurship and Social Justice.

She is also the co-founder and CEO of In-Med Prognostics, a med-tech firm that uses AI and Deep Tech to develop brain health predictive analytics.

Dr. Poonamallee received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University, M.B.A. from Pondicherry University, and B.A. and M.A. from University of Madras.