Escaping the “Now”: Discovery-Oriented AI, Strategic Attention, and Managerial Temporal Myopia

Does artificial intelligence (AI) lock executives into a high-velocity “now”, or can it expand strategic attention toward a distant “then”? We argue that this divergence cannot be explained by AI adoption intensity; it hinges on how firms build AI capability for different strategic purposes.We theorize AI as an infrastructure that shapes what issues become salient and how strategic attention is distributed over time. Drawing on the attention-based view, we argue that the effects of AI depend on distinct capability configurations. In particular, discovery-oriented AI broadens representations of possible future and reduces managerial temporal myopia by shifting attention toward longer-horizon issues and embedding foresight in organizational attention structures. Using a firm-year panel of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2014 to 2024, we combine MD&A-based textual measures of managerial temporal myopia with recruitment-based measures of AI capability and find that discovery-oriented AI capability is negatively associated with temporal myopia, whereas general AI hiring intensity exhibits an insignificant relationship. The negative effect is weaker under CEO duality and stronger when TMT heterogeneity and industry competition are higher. Temporal myopia, in turn, is positively associated with a narrower technological search. These findings clarify when AI extends managerial time horizons and highlight the importance of capability composition in shaping the temporality of strategic attention.