The Emergence of One-Person Companies as Human–AI Socio-Technical Systems: Evidence from AI Ecosystem Density in Chinese Cities

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) now allows a single founder, working with a cluster of AI agents as “digital employees,” to run a venture that once required a team. We call this form the one-person company (OPC) and treat it as a human–AI socio-technical system with a “1 + N + AI” architecture, whose viability depends on the density of the surrounding AI ecosystem. Anchored in a systematic review of 2452 studies reported under PRISMA 2020, we build a task-based model in which a founder allocates tasks across her own labor, hired labor, and AI agents; once the local AI ecosystem density crosses a threshold, one person can cover the whole value chain. The model yields three propositions on the level, heterogeneity, and cost channel of OPC entry, which we test on a panel of 35 major Chinese cities (2019–2024). A one-percent increase in a city’s AI enterprise stock raises OPC entry by about 1.06 percent, an estimate robust to a Bartik shift-share instrument; the effect concentrates in initially AI-sparse, ordinary, and central–western cities and strengthens with the tertiary-sector share, as the threshold model predicts. Because OPCs are asset-light and create knowledge-intensive work, AI ecosystem building emerges as a lever for inclusive, sustainable entrepreneurship.