AI That Helps Us Help Each Other: A Proactive System for Scaffolding Mentor-Novice Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Coaching

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Huang, Evey Jiaxin, Easterday, Matthew, Gerber, Elizabeth
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Huang, Evey Jiaxin
Easterday, Matthew
Gerber, Elizabeth
author_facet Huang, Evey Jiaxin
Easterday, Matthew
Gerber, Elizabeth
contents Entrepreneurship requires navigating open-ended, ill-defined problems: identifying risks, challenging assumptions, and making strategic decisions under deep uncertainty. Novice founders often struggle with these metacognitive demands, while mentors face limited time and visibility to provide tailored support. We present a human-AI coaching system that combines a domain-specific cognitive model of entrepreneurial risk with a large language model (LLM) to proactively scaffold both novice and mentor thinking. The system proactively poses diagnostic questions that challenge novices' thinking and helps both novices and mentors plan for more focused and emotionally attuned meetings. Critically, mentors can inspect and modify the underlying cognitive model, shaping the logic of the system to reflect their evolving needs. Through an exploratory field deployment, we found that using the system supported novice metacognition, helped mentors plan emotionally attuned strategies, and improved meeting depth, intentionality, and focus--while also surfaced key tensions around trust, misdiagnosis, and expectations of AI. We contribute design principles for proactive AI systems that scaffold metacognition and human-human collaboration in complex, ill-defined domains, offering implications for similar domains like healthcare, education, and knowledge work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11052
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI That Helps Us Help Each Other: A Proactive System for Scaffolding Mentor-Novice Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Coaching
Huang, Evey Jiaxin
Easterday, Matthew
Gerber, Elizabeth
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
68T35 (Primary), 68U99 (Secondary)
H.5.2
Entrepreneurship requires navigating open-ended, ill-defined problems: identifying risks, challenging assumptions, and making strategic decisions under deep uncertainty. Novice founders often struggle with these metacognitive demands, while mentors face limited time and visibility to provide tailored support. We present a human-AI coaching system that combines a domain-specific cognitive model of entrepreneurial risk with a large language model (LLM) to proactively scaffold both novice and mentor thinking. The system proactively poses diagnostic questions that challenge novices' thinking and helps both novices and mentors plan for more focused and emotionally attuned meetings. Critically, mentors can inspect and modify the underlying cognitive model, shaping the logic of the system to reflect their evolving needs. Through an exploratory field deployment, we found that using the system supported novice metacognition, helped mentors plan emotionally attuned strategies, and improved meeting depth, intentionality, and focus--while also surfaced key tensions around trust, misdiagnosis, and expectations of AI. We contribute design principles for proactive AI systems that scaffold metacognition and human-human collaboration in complex, ill-defined domains, offering implications for similar domains like healthcare, education, and knowledge work.
title AI That Helps Us Help Each Other: A Proactive System for Scaffolding Mentor-Novice Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Coaching
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
68T35 (Primary), 68U99 (Secondary)
H.5.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11052