Harvard and INSEAD compared 2,891 startups... “AI native companies have 25% fewer employees and simpler job hierarchies.”

Professor Hyunjin Kim of INSEAD, a global business school, and Professor Rembrand Koning of Harvard Business School announced these results in a draft research paper titled ‘AI-Native Firms’ published in June. The researchers analyzed 2,891 startups that passed Y Combinator (YC) between 2020 and 2024, of which 990 were AI startups. The researchers first distinguished AI companies from non-AI companies based on the ‘artificial-intelligence’ or ‘ai’ tags that startups that went through YC registered directly in their public profiles.