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In early-stage entrepreneurial teams, trust perceptions about new teammates shape venture compatibility and performance. With AI adoption in entrepreneurial teams, early trust dynamics are underexplored. This study investigates trust formation and recalibration when a new teammate is AI, a human, or a human using AI. In a scenario-based experiment with 205 participants, we measured trustworthiness, affective trust, and cognitive trust before and after observing a new teammate’s work. AI teammates began with lower affective trust but gained significantly after observation, while human-using AI teammates were trusted similarly, or more than non-augmented humans. Cognitive trust declined across all teammates but remained comparatively stable for AI. Findings contribute to entrepreneurship and human-AI teaming research by showing that trust calibration depends on teammate type and competence, and by introducing augmented teammates as a distinct category. Practically, ventures adopting AI may benefit from augmentation, with clear human accountability and disclosure of AI capabilities, fostering higher early-stage trust.
Spurrier et al. (Tue,) studied this question.