Artificial Intelligence in Strategic Decision-Making: From Automation to Augmentation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a research area that has had significant up-and-down trends in its history, dating back to more than 60 years of activity. Recent years have witnessed a long-term revival driven by advances in computational power and the proliferation of big data. With the fast development of this new age of AI, once more it is an object of critical academic research. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues of implementing the latest AI-based systems to aid the decision-making process in the organization and suggest a list of the relevant research directions of the information systems (IS) scholars. It has brought up debate around the issue of human judgment in the core business processes as some worry that intelligent machines will continue to replace human decision-makers. In this article, the author is pushing towards a more subtle and practical view. It argues that a symbiotic interaction between human and artificial intelligence can improve the outcomes of the organization: AI systems can expand human cognition by dealing with complexity and performing structured data processing, whereas humans can provide the necessary holistic, intuitive, and moral judgment especially in the environment of uncertainty and ambiguity. On a macro level, AI is showing an increasing ability in work formerly seized as the preserve of human activity. Due to the displacement paradigm, a counter-paradigm considers AI not as a replacement of human brains but as an intelligence augmentation (IA) tool. This study aims to critically examine these conflicting views human replacement versus human augmentation and investigate their implication and possible risks that such views have in the era of more autonomous and perceptive machines.