How Does Firms’ Artificial Intelligence Adoption Affect Different Stakeholders? A Systematic Review and the AIMS Framework

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly adopted by firms for different organizational purposes. While such AI adoption is expected to affect firm performance, it may also have different effects on firms' stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, and customers. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the stakeholder implications of AI adoption, we conduct a systematic review of 84 relevant papers published in business journals in the past 8 years (2017-2024). Our review suggests that firms' AI adoption does have different, sometimes conflicting, effects on different stakeholder groups. We also uncover several limitations of the extant literature and develop an integrative AIMS (AI Impacts Multiple Stakeholders) framework that summarizes important directions for future research. Our AIMS framework emphasizes the need to consider underexplored stakeholder groups such as suppliers and competitors, as well as the trade-offs and dynamics among different stakeholder groups induced by AI adoption. Our framework also encourages future research to move beyond examining the direct impact of AI adoption on stakeholders by investigating when (contextual factors) and why (underlying mechanisms) AI adoption affects stakeholders, thereby advancing the literature on AI-stakeholder relationships. Finally, we discuss the implications for future operations management research, encouraging scholars to adopt a supply chain perspective to study the stakeholder implications of firms' AI adoption.