2.5 Research question and hypotheses:

Given the cost, scale, and skill-agnostic benefits, and despite the wariness over an uncanny value risk, or perhaps because the technology has advanced beyond immediate synthetic recognition, corporate America readily adopted the high-fidelity results of these avatar programs, with over half of Fortune 500 companies reporting use of the modern wave of AI-animation-powered synthetic avatars for their communications, such as internal learning and development (Bergen, 2023). The potential of this technology for entrepreneurial use, however, is less clear and is untested in the literature to-date. While the literature is clear on the power of a human spokesperson in an entrepreneurial pitch video, whether a synthetic avatar is a viable option is a question untested and unanswered in the existing literature. A central question thus guides this study: What is the comparative effectiveness of synthetic avatar spokesperson entrepreneurial pitch videos compared to an organic human spokesperson video?
This study offers the following hypotheses to guide the methodology and analysis: