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Article History

Received: 22 August 2025

Accepted: 15 June 2026

First Online: 3 July 2026

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study, titled ** “Frugal AI and Entrepreneurial Decision-Making in India”**, does not involve any clinical trials, biomedical procedures, or research involving human biological material.As the research was based on a self-administered survey focused on consumer perceptions and behavior in a non-clinical setting, **formal ethical approval was not applicable** and the same was proposed to the Institute Research Committee for their consideration. As the study involved non-sensitive interview data and posed minimal risk to participants, it qualified for exemption from formal institutional ethical review under the institutional research guidelines for social science research. The committee waived the need for approval.Participants were informed about the objectives of the study, voluntary participation, confidentiality measures, and their right to withdraw at any time during the study.Participants provided informed consent via a Google Form outlining the purpose and characteristics of the study, and were informed that the information would be used for a scholarly study that would lead to publication. Participants are not identified since participant-generated codes are used to pseudo-anonymize the data. A username and password are required to access Google Forms, where any information gathered from the online interviews is saved. The researcher will keep the data for a year before securely destroying it that year. Every piece of information gathered for the study is kept completely confidential. Only the researcher may access the data, which is the researcher's responsibility.

Consent to publish: Participants provided informed consent via a Google Form outlining the purpose and characteristics of the study, and were informed that the information would be used for a scholarly study that would lead to publication. They were informed that the data they provided would be kept confidential and used for academic purposes, with the aim of producing a research publication. All authors give their consent for the publication of this manuscript in the Discover Sustainability Journal . The manuscript is original, has not been published before, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All authors have approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its submission.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.