Artificial intelligence innovation to sustainable knowledge: The dual role of enterprise resilience

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) presents unprecedented opportunities for knowledge creation and sustainable innovation in global digital commerce. This study investigates how AI orchestration capability generates new forms of knowledge that drive sustainable development in cross-border e-commerce multinational enterprises, with enterprise resilience serving as a critical knowledge transformation mechanism. Drawing on resource orchestration theory and employing a mixed-methods approach, we analyze data from 444 enterprises across China and Europe using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), importance–performance map analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), and executive interviews. Our findings reveal that AI orchestration capability—encompassing planning, integration, and reconfiguration dimensions—creates actionable knowledge that significantly enhances sustainable development both directly and indirectly through enterprise resilience. Enterprise resilience emerges as a dual-function capability that not only mediates knowledge flows between AI systems and sustainability outcomes but also amplifies the innovation potential of AI-generated insights. Regional analysis uncovers distinct knowledge creation pathways: Chinese enterprises excel at transforming AI capabilities into resilience-based knowledge, while European firms demonstrate superior translation of resilience-derived knowledge into sustainability innovations. Configurational analysis identifies multiple equifinal combinations of AI capabilities and resilience dimensions that generate high-impact sustainable innovations. This research advances our understanding of how digital technologies create enduring knowledge for sustainability, offering novel theoretical insights into innovation–knowledge dynamics and practical guidance for leveraging AI as a catalyst for sustainable business transformation in the digital economy.