---
id: "claim-ai-apprehension-metrics"
type: "claim"
source_timestamps: ["§ Adoption of AI in Entrepreneurial Businesses"]
tags: ["risk-management", "barriers-to-entry"]
related: ["concept-ambitious-entrepreneurs", "open-question-data-privacy", "open-question-skills-gap"]
confidence: "high"
testable: true
speakers: ["Jeffrey P. Shay", "Donna Kelley", "Mahdi Majbouri", "Thomas H. Davenport"]
sources: ["spine"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-spine"
originDay: 1
articleStem: "hbr-ext-20-entrepreneurs-scale-with-ai"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/08/how-ambitious-entrepreneurs-can-use-ai-to-scale-their-startups"
sourceTitle: "How Ambitious Entrepreneurs Can Use AI to Scale Their Startups"
---
# Enthusiasm for AI Is Tempered by Specific Apprehensions

**Claim:** Even among highly motivated [[concept-ambitious-entrepreneurs]], significant barriers to AI adoption remain. The top concerns cited are:

- **Data privacy — 88%** (see [[open-question-data-privacy]])
- **Costs and implementation hurdles — 84%**
- **Customer resistance — 81%**
- **Employee resistance — 72%** (the concern that peer-led adoption is designed to mitigate — see [[claim-bottom-up-adoption-trust]])

Furthermore, only about **10% of these ambitious entrepreneurs operate in tech-intensive sectors**, suggesting a widespread lack of inherent technical skills to manage implementations (see [[open-question-skills-gap]]).

**Confidence: high** (author-stated), **testable: true**.

**Enrichment caveat:** It is well supported that data privacy, cost/implementation barriers, and skills gaps are major constraints on entrepreneurial AI adoption (GEM ties disparities to limited access, skills, and infrastructure). But the **precise percentages (88/84/81/72) and the "10% tech-intensive" statistic are not confirmable from public GEM excerpts** — treat them as the authors' analysis of a proprietary survey segment rather than independently validated numbers.