AI for Sustainable Management: Integrating Innovation, Corporate Responsibility and Business Performance

Sustainable management asks firms to create value that is economically sound, socially responsible, and environmentally responsible at once, a balance that has long been difficult to strike. Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a general-purpose enabler that can help organisations pursue these goals simultaneously rather than in tension. This conceptual paper examines how AI links three dimensions that are often managed separately: innovation, corporate responsibility, and business performance. It argues that AI’s core capabilities, data analytics, prediction, automation, and optimisation, allow firms to innovate more responsibly, to measure and improve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, and to raise operational and financial performance, and that the greatest value arises when these dimensions are integrated rather than optimised in isolation. The paper develops an integrated conceptual framework in which AI operates as a central hub connecting the three dimensions in the service of sustainable management, and it maps representative AI capabilities to each dimension along with their mechanisms and intended outcomes. A conceptual trajectory illustrates how the combined value of these dimensions may grow super-additively as a firm’s AI-enabled sustainability maturity advances. The paper also addresses the risks that accompany AI adoption, including energy and resource costs, bias, opacity, data governance, and the danger of “greenwashing” through selective reporting, and it offers managerial recommendations for responsible integration. As a conceptual contribution, the paper advances propositions intended to guide practice and to invite empirical testing.