Socratic Pitches: Agent-Led Entrepreneur–Investor Debates for Entrepreneurship Literacy

Entrepreneurship education often treats pitching and due diligence as endpoints for assessment rather than core learning processes. To address this gap, we present Debate-to-Learn Entrepreneurship (D2LE), an agent-led instructional approach in which two multimodal roles—an Entrepreneur and an Investor—engage in structured debate to develop entrepreneurship literacy. The Entrepreneur agent synthesizes opportunity hypotheses into concrete artifacts. The Investor agent conducts multimodal due diligence by challenging assumptions, requesting evidence, and critiquing artifacts. A rubric-guided moderator manages turn-taking, enforces retrieval and citation when claims are made, and aligns debate moves with learning objectives including opportunity recognition, market sizing, go-to-market strategy, unit economics, risk analysis, and ethics. To reduce hallucination and promote reliability, D2LE integrates cross-agent verification, retrieval-augmented checking, and explicit citation. To support equity and inclusion, the system adapts language level, domain context, and risk tolerance to learner background and locale. We specify design choices and outline an evaluation roadmap with planned ablations to isolate the effects of retrieval and cross-examination.