Are digital natives ready to use GenAI for serious work?

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly diffusing across organisations, yet little is known about how digital natives assess its usefulness for business and entrepreneurship (BEC-PU). Understanding how this cohort evaluates GenAI is crucial for responsible organisational adoption. This study investigates whether GenAI tools are perceived as professionally valuable by techno-creative digital natives through their contribution to techno-creative and entrepreneurial (TC/BE) skills. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), UTAUT2 and Task-Technology Fit (TTF), we adopt a multi-stage design combining an exploratory classroom-based qualitative phase and a survey of Spanish undergraduates in techno-creative degrees. Survey data were analysed using PLS-SEM. Results show that artistic generation and writing assistance GenAI tools are positively related to both techno-creative and business–entrepreneurial skills, while basic management tools relate positively to business–entrepreneurial skills. By contrast, audiovisual production tools show no meaningful relationships in the model, and technical specialisation tools display a negative association with techno-creative skills. None of the GenAI categories shows a significant direct effect on BEC-PU. Instead, perceived business usefulness emerges mainly through TC/BE skill development, with the clearest indirect effects observed for artistic generation and writing assistance tools. These findings suggest that digital natives in techno-creative higher education contexts do not yet perceive GenAI as directly useful for “serious” business-oriented work; rather, they attribute business value to GenAI once it has helped them to build capabilities. The study contributes a “learning-to-business-value” perspective on GenAI adoption and offers implications for training and professionalising strategies that strengthen task-fit, usability and the integration of GenAI into creative and entrepreneurial workflows.