Designing a Human-Centered AI Coach for Entrepreneurial Readiness: Fostering Empathy and Critical Design Futures Thinking in Interdisciplinary Learning

<br>Higher-education entrepreneurship programs seldom integrate cognitive-science insights or human-centred information-systems (IS) design, resulting in sporadic gains in students’ creativity and entrepreneurial readiness. We present early findings from an exploratory case study that embeds a conversational AI coach, grounded in empathy, critical design futures thinking, and Socratic dialogue, into a university-wide interdisciplinary design-innovation course. The AI coach dynamically scaffolds reflection, metacognition, and iterative prototyping. Using an explanatory-sequential mixed-methods design, we administer a validated entrepreneurial readiness survey (pre/post) to 100 undergraduates and complement the quantitative shifts with think-aloud interviews and focus-group discussions. Planned analyses will test whether AI-mediated cognitive engagement predicts significant improvements in entrepreneurial readiness and collaborative innovation skills. Findings suggest students’ heightened self-reflection, reframing of problem statements, as they test assumptions and develop dispositions like resilience and adaptability. Findings aim to extend human-centred IS theory and provide design principles for ethically scaling adaptive, cognition-aware entrepreneurial coaching.<br>