Predicting whether or not companies will be successful is crucial for guiding investment decisions and designing effective economic policies. However, past research on high-growth firms—enterprises thought to be key for driving economic development—has typically shown low predictive accuracy, suggesting that growth may be largely random. Does this assumption still hold in the AI era, in which vast amounts of data and advanced analytical methods are now available? Can AI techniques overcome difficulties in predicting high-growth firms? These questions were raised in a chapter I co-authored in the De Gruyter Handbook of SME Entrepreneurship, which reviewed scientific contributions on firm growth prediction with AI methods.
AI methods help predict the emergence of ‘gazelles’ and other high-growth firms, but challenges remain
