The impact of artificial intelligence implementation on the commercial success of startups.

About this paper

Marat Ressin asks a narrow question with a practical edge: when a startup puts artificial intelligence at the core of what it sells rather than beside it, does that show up in the money.

The study pairs two kinds of evidence. On the national level it tracks research and development spending against the operating profit of Canadian innovation firms from 2010 to 2024. On the company level it surveys 68 Canadian startups building on AI, and interviews their founders and executives about what changed.

Across the national data the two lines move together closely — a correlation coefficient of 0.92, with a regression model explaining 90% of the variation. Ressin is explicit that this is an association rather than a demonstrated cause: firm size, stage, sector dynamics and regional conditions sit outside the model, and he frames the result as supporting a hypothesis rather than proving one.

The pattern in the survey is consistent: the effect is felt most strongly inside the company and least strongly at its edges. Four in five startups report better business processes; two in three report a wider customer base. Interviews point to the same order — faster data handling, sharper forecasting and lower costs come first, and reaching new customers follows later.

Where a company sits matters as much as what it builds. The Toronto–Waterloo corridor leads on startup formation, with information technology and AI dominating and clean technology drawing steady investor interest. Ressin ties the differences to access to skilled people, regional clusters and institutional support — the assets a technology alone does not supply.

The paper also sets out what AI adoption carries with it: displacement of work as processes automate, algorithms whose decisions are hard to explain, and a widening gap between startups that reach advanced tools and talent and those that do not. Ressin treats these as part of the assessment rather than a footnote to it.

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Citation

Ressin, M. (2026). The impact of artificial intelligence implementation on the commercial success of startups. Virtual Economics, 9(1), 88–111. https://doi.org/10.34021/ve.2026.09.01(4)

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Licence & attribution

© Marat Ressin 2026. Made available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0): it may be shared, redistributed, and adapted for any purpose, including commercially, with credit.

To reuse, credit: “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Implementation on the Commercial Success of Startups” by Marat Ressin, Virtual Economics, 9(1), 88–111, 2026, CC BY 4.0.