AI, Sustainability, Organizations, and Society

Dear Colleagues,

The world is currently facing a severe climate crisis. The time for debating climate change or global warming has passed; now, we must act. Although the barriers are highly complex and will require all our technical knowledge to provide instant and long-term solutions, we continue to grapple with the need to reshape human activities to ensure long-term existential viability more than 30 years after the notable Brundtland Commission Report (Nishant et al., 2020). Artificial intelligence (AI), which enables robots to "learn from experience, react to new information, and execute human-like activities," is one of the most intriguing possibilities (Bromuri et al., 2020).

The use of AI is transforming how businesses operate on a broad scale. With AI offering job effectiveness and productivity across a wide range of applications, its adoption signifies a fundamental change in how organizations conduct business and oversee their personnel. According to van Esch et al. (2019, p. 215), AI is defined as "any expert system (e.g., device) that differentiates between distinct contexts and can choose a series of task(s) to improve the effectiveness of reaching preset goals”. In various fields, including banking, transport, medical, and cyber security, AI systems gather information, analyze data, and improve decision making. AI can help develop organizational and individual strategies that are acceptable in society to lessen the need for energy and natural resources to fuel human activity. The ultimate benefit of AI is not how it helps organizations and society to consume fewer resources; its full value will be achieved through its support and enablement of efficient ecological governance. Information asymmetries and human emotions, two issues that obstruct the development of sustainable ecological solutions, may be resolved by AI (Nishant et al., 2020). Society and organizations have the chance to advance, quicken, or change their approach to environmental issues by utilizing AI to perform massive pattern recognition with enormous volumes of data. However, a revolutionary change is necessary to develop science-based remedies and strategies that go beyond conventional thinking.

As an alternative, AI provides humans with freedom from scientism and the self-interest of individuals and small groups and individuals to discuss, plan, and implement comprehensive solutions to ecological destruction and climate catastrophe. Although people have conceptualized the initial design of AI systems, as the machine absorbs and adapts to large volumes of data, its decisions will vary from those made by knowledgeable humans. Despite their intrinsic technicality, AI systems' success will depend on how successfully they manage and impact the psychological, social, and organizational barriers to human advancement in this field.

This Special Issue invites scholars and experts to explore the impact of AI use by organizations and society on organizational and environmental sustainability to encourage AI in environmental innovativeness and recommend practical uses of AI to improve sustainable development. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Use of AI in organizational sustainability;
• AI and human resource management;
• AI and green marketing;
• AI and green behavior;
• Application of AI in service research and its impacts on service sustainability;
• Human–AI interaction for sustainable development;
• Human actor’s psychological response to AI.

References

Bromuri, S., Henkel, A. P., Iren, D., & Urovi, V. (2020). Using AI to predict service agent stress from emotion patterns in service interactions. Journal of Service Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-06-2019-0163.

Van Esch, P., Black, J. S., & Ferolie, J. (2019). Marketing AI recruitment: The next phase in job application and selection. Computers in Human Behavior, 90, 215–222.

Nishant, R., Kennedy, M., & Corbett, J. (2020). Artificial intelligence for sustainability: Challenges, opportunities, and a research agenda. International Journal of Information Management, 53, 102104. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.IJINFOMGT.2020.102104.

Prof. Dr. Ali Nawaz Khan
Prof. Dr. Khalid Mehmood
Prof. Dr. Atif Aziz
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• green human resources
• artificial intelligence
• sustainability
• green career
• leadership and environmental development
• AI for sustainable development
• consumer behaviour and environment
• schools and environment
• organizations and environment
• role of society in environmental protection
• sustainable marketing