Entrepreneurship and creative destruction: the enduring relevance of Schumpeter in the age of artificial intelligence

Purpose This study aims to reexamine Schumpeter’s framework of entrepreneurship and creative destruction to assess its explanatory power in artificial intelligence (AI)-intensive capitalism, where algorithmic technologies reshape the structural conditions under which entrepreneurial agency and innovation unfold. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a conceptual reinterpretation approach grounded in a close reading of Schumpeter’s principal texts, placing this reconstruction in dialogue with contemporary literature on AI and entrepreneurship, as well as with post-Schumpeterian patterns, including Schumpeter Mark I, Mark II and intellectual monopoly dynamics. Findings Moreover, AI confirmed the Schumpeterian conceptual core, radicalised its dynamics through temporal compression and ecosystemic displacement and necessitated a partial reformulation. Entrepreneurial judgement under radical uncertainty remained irreducible, although agency became distributed across hybrid human-algorithmic configurations where formative creativity grows increasingly automatable, while transformative creativity was dependent on human judgement. Creative destruction shifts towards platform-governed ecosystemic architectures and the prevailing Schumpeterian pattern depends on each sector’s appropriability and governance conditions, rather than on the technology itself. Where intellectual monopoly dynamics prevail, innovation is co-produced across the periphery and the capture of its returns concentrates asymmetrically at the nucleus. Originality/value This study rethinks the relationship between entrepreneurship, creative destruction and AI by reinterpreting the internal tensions in Schumpeter’s work. Based on this reconstruction, it develops a framework of distributed agency and ecosystemic creative destruction centred on the distinction between formative and transformative creativity at the institutional level and identifies the appropriate conditions under which innovation generates structural discontinuities. This further shows that the Schumpeterian patterns associated with AI emerge from sector-specific configurations of appropriability and governance, providing a structural explanation that previous management literature had left underdeveloped.