Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Business Decision-Making: Linking Strategic Value Creation and Ethical Governance through a Structured Literature Review
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating business decision-making procedures and transforming strategic management, organizational structures, and governance systems. This paper presents a systematic literature review as a synthesis of multidisciplinary research on the adoption of AI, with two dimensions that are closely connected, namely, strategic value creation and ethical issues. The results show that AI improves predictive accuracy, operational performance, and dynamic capability building, which lead to the competitive advantage and firm performance. Nonetheless, the achievement of such value should rely on the organizational preparedness, alignment of governance, and the human-AI cooperation. At the same time, the ethical risks posed by AI adoption, such as algorithmic bias, lack of transparency, privacy, and lack of accountability, can harm the levels of trust and legitimacy among stakeholders. The review indicates that strategic value and ethical governance are complementary as opposed to competing goals. To have a sustainable AI application, it is necessary to have explainability mechanisms, algorithmic accountability systems, and robust data governance systems that are incorporated into organizational strategy. Combining the perspectives of strategic management, information systems, and AI ethics, the paper offers an extensive perspective on the interpretation of AI-inflicted change in business decision-making and gives guidelines to future research.
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© 2026 Horizons Intermediary Journal of Business Research. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). All rights reserved by the journal.
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