From Substituting to Augmenting: Understanding the Relationship Between Data, AI Capabilities and Value Creation in Organizations

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to an increased interest and debate on its role in creating value for organizations. On the one hand, recent work focusing on platforms has argued that the AI capabilities of organizations enable them to generate and capture value (Clough & Wu, 2022; Gregory, Henfridsson, Kaganer, & Kyriakou, 2021, 2022). On the other hand, another stream of the most recent literature has argued that AI exacerbates learning myopia in organizations (Balasubramanian, Ye, & Xu, 2022). In this work, we consolidate this ongoing debate by theorizing and explicating how the value generated by an organization will increase when the AI capabilities of an organization enable the harnessing of connected, disjointed, and synthetic data— which we call learning effects. We consolidate the aforementioned debate by explicating when AI capabilities associated with connected, disjointed, and synthetic data will generate and capture greater value.