AI for Sustainable Innovation: Translating Insights into Strategic Action
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI governance, Insight-to-action gap, Responsible AI, Sustainable innovation, Sustainability strategy, Systems integrationAbstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great potential to promote sustainable innovation. It can help tackle urgent environmental, social, and economic issues by improving resource use, forecasting, and integrating systems across various sectors. However, despite the rising interest, organizations find it challenging to turn AI insights into practical sustainability actions. This struggle stems from fragmented structures, poor governance, and complicated ethical issues. This research aims to close these gaps by creating and testing a clear framework that explains how to use AI to support sustainable innovation while meeting sustainability goals. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, combining a systematic literature review with semi-structured interviews of experts from academia, industry, and policy. This method allows for a detailed summary of various knowledge areas and highlights real-world challenges and best practices for applying AI to sustainability. The findings identify seven key aspects. These include AI's role in integrating systems, gaps in turning insights into action, issues with data fragmentation, governance problems, ethical and equity concerns, sustainability challenges posed by AI, and the need for responsible, context-aware use of AI. The validated framework gives strong theoretical and practical support for organizations and policymakers as they explore AI's potential for sustainable innovation. It highlights the need to align technological opportunities with organizational readiness, ethical governance, and strategic decision-making. This work enriches academic discussions by blending perspectives from technology, management, ethics, and policy. It also provides practical advice to promote resilient and fair innovation systems in the changing landscape of digital sustainability.
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