Addressing the need for mechanisms to promote collaborative innovation aimed at developing the circular economy, this paper presents the results of an experiment aimed at proposing a solution for generating collaborative projects to make the most of under-exploited resources and create project groups based on the capabilities of the participants. Based on a design research approach, we collected data from a group of 25 participants and tested the model of the three gates of coupled open innovation to generate proposals for circular economy projects based on the combination of the essential factors identified in the model: markets and resources. Drawing on the power of Microsoft Copilot, our experiment generated 6 customized ideas based on the capabilities described by participants. We compared these results with a previous experiment realized without AI, but gamification incentives. The introduction of AI into the co-innovation process considerably improved the speed and quantity of ideas generated, despite time constraints. Feedback from participants was positive, but we identified ways for improvement. The experiment demonstrated the ability of AI to generate fast circular economy solutions elicitation through a crowd and fast potential partner identification and business cohort composition.