Tag Archives: big data

Unpacking the AI Blackbox: The Impact of AI Strategies on Firm Performance with a Dual Lens on Product and Process Orientation

Park, Jaecheol, Myunghwan Lee, Gene Moo Lee “Unpacking the AI Blackbox: The Impact of AI Strategies on Firm Performance with a Dual Lens on Product and Process Orientation”, Work-in-Progress.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have become increasingly pervasive and hold great potential for large-scale economic impact. Aligned with this trend, numerous studies explore the adoption and use of AI technologies on firm performance. However, they predominantly focus on AI as an input (e.g., labor/job posting), neglecting to consider the strategic deployment of AI in business operations. Thus, it is crucial to understand “how” and “where” to use AI to achieve business value. In this paper, we examine how firms’ strategic AI orientation affects firm performance with a dual lens on product and process orientation. We measure AI orientation by employing LLM to assess it from strategy descriptions in Form 10-K filings between 2015 and 2022. Our findings show that 13% of firms have AI orientation, 7% have AI product orientation, and 3% have AI process orientation. Additionally, we will provide some preliminary results on the impact of AI orientation on firm performance. 

From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising

Yuan, Lin, Gene Moo Lee, Hao Xia, Qiang Ye. “From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising”, Accepted at CIST 2023.

We examine how a seller’s posting time strategies of short video advertising affect consumer engagement and product sales. Drawing on the two-factory theory, we develop hypotheses on the effects of ad spacing and scheduling on ad effectiveness. The empirical results based on a unique short video ad dataset from Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, indicate that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between ad spacing and sales. Also, certain posting times significantly increase ad effectiveness. Interestingly, the effects of posting time strategies manifest under specific conditions: the effects of ad spacing on consumer purchase are strengthened for products with higher discounts, while this moderating effect is diverse for different posting times. These results provide nuanced insights to help ad managers make strategic decisions on ad posting times in the important context of social commerce.

Xiaoke Zhang’s Master’s Thesis

Xiaoke Zhang (2023). “How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Video Creation? Evidence from TikTok”, Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia

Supervisors: Gene Moo Lee, Mi Zhou

The rising demand for online video content has fostered one of the fastest-growing markets as evidenced by the popularity of platforms like TikTok. Because video content is often difficult to create, platforms have attempted to leverage recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) to help creators with their video creation process. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of AI on content creators’ productivity and creative patterns in this emerging market. Our paper investigates the adoption impact of AI-generated voice – a generative AI technology creating acoustic artifacts – on video creators by empirically analyzing a unique dataset of 4,021 creators and their 428,918 videos on TikTok. Utilizing multiple audio and video analytics algorithms, we detect the adoption of AI voice from the massive video data and generate rich measurements for each video to quantify its characteristics. We then estimate the effects of AI voice using a difference-in-differences model coupled with look-ahead propensity score matching. Our results suggest that the adoption of AI voice increases creators’ video production and that it induces creators to produce shorter videos with more negative words. Interestingly, creators produce more novel videos with less self-disclosure when using AI voice. We also find that AI-voice videos received less viewer engagement unintendedly. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how generative AI reshapes video content creation on online platforms, which provides important implications for creators, platforms, and policymakers in the digital economy.

 

The Effect of Mobile Device Management on Work-from-home Productivity: Insights from U.S. Public Firms

Park, Jaecheol, Myunghwan Lee, Gene Moo Lee “The Effect of Mobile Device Management on Work-from-home Productivity: Insights from U.S. Public Firms”, Work-in-Progress.

  • Based on an industry collaboration
  • Presentations: UBC 2023, MSISR 2023, KrAIS 2023, WeB 2023, AOM 2024
  • Best Paper Nomination at WeB 2023

The use of mobile IT, providing employees with accessibility, flexibility, and connectivity, has become increasingly vital for businesses, especially for work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite its prevalence and importance in the industry, the business value of mobile device management (MDM) and its role in establishing digital resilience remain underexplored in the literature. To address this research gap, our study examines the effect of MDM on a firm’s resilience to the pandemic. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), we utilize novel proprietary data from a global MDM solution provider for U.S. public firms. We find that firms with MDM have better financial performance during the pandemic, demonstrating greater resilience to the shock. Additionally, we explore the moderating role of external and internal factors, revealing that firms with high environmental munificence or those with low IT capabilities experience greater resilience effects from MDM. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous effects across industries that firms in industry sectors demanding greater mobility have a greater resilience effect from MDM. This study contributes to the information systems literature by emphasizing the business value of MDM and its crucial role in building digital resilience.

Myunghwan Lee’s PhD Proposal: Three Essays on AI Strategies and Innovation

Myunghwan Lee (2023) “Three Essays on AI Strategies and Innovation”, Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal, University of British Columbia. https://sites.google.com/view/myunghwanlee/home

Supervisor: Gene Moo Lee

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, along with the explosive growth of digitized data, are transforming many industries and our society. While both academia and industry consider AI closely intertwined with innovation, we still have limited knowledge of the business and economic values of AI on innovation. This three-essay dissertation seeks to address this gap (i) by proposing a novel firm-level measure to identify strategically innovative firms; (ii) by examining how firm-level AI capabilities affect knowledge innovation; and (iii) by investigating the impact of robotics, embodied AI with a physical presence, on operational innovation.

In the first essay, we propose a novel firm-level measure, Strategic Competitive Positioning (SCP), to identify distinctive strategic positioning (i.e., first-movers, second-movers) and competition relationships. Drawing on network theory, we develop a structural hole-based, dynamic, and firm-specific SCP measure. Notably, this SCP measure is constructed using unsupervised machine-learning and network analytics approaches with minimal human intervention. Using a large dataset of 10-K annual reports from 13,476 public firms in the U.S., we demonstrate the value of the proposed measure by examining the impact of SCP on subsequent IPO performance.

In the second essay, we study the impact of firm-level AI capabilities on exploratory innovation to determine how AI’s value-creation process can facilitate knowledge innovation. Drawing on March and Simon (1958), we theorize how AI capabilities can help firms overcome bounded rationality and pursue exploratory innovation. We compiled a unique dataset consisting of 54,649 AI conference publications, 3 million patent filings, and 1.9 million inter-firm transactions to test the hypotheses. The findings show that a firm’s AI capabilities have a positive impact on exploratory innovation, and interestingly that conventional exploratory innovation-seeking approaches (e.g., traditional data management capabilities and inter-firm technology collaborations) negatively moderate the positive impact of AI capabilities on exploratory innovation.

The impact of AI technologies can be beyond knowledge innovation. Embodied AI technologies, specifically robotics, are driving operational innovation in manufacturing and service industries. While industrial robots designed for pre-defined tasks in controlled environments are extensively studied, little is known about the impact of AI-based service robots designed for customer-facing dynamic environments. In the third essay, we seek to examine how service robots can affect operational efficiency and service quality using the case of the hospitality industry. The preliminary results from a difference-in-differences model using a dataset of 4,610 restaurants in Singapore demonstrate that service robot adoption increases customer satisfaction, specifically through perceived service quality. To validate the initial result and further explore underlying mechanisms, we plan to collect additional datasets from different geographic areas and industries.

 

Disrupt with AI: The Impact of Deep Learning Capabilities on Exploratory Innovation

Lee, Myunghwan, Victor Cui, Gene Moo Lee. “Disrupt with AI: The Impact of Deep Learning Capabilities on Exploratory Innovation”, AOM 2023

Given the importance of exploratory innovation in fostering firms’ sustainable competitive advantages, firms often depend on technological assets or inter-firm relationships to pursue exploration. Regarded as a general-purpose technology, deep learning (DL)-based artificial intelligence (AI) can be an exploratory innovation-seeking instrument for firms in searching unexplored resources and thereby broadening their boundary. Drawing on the theories of organizational learning and path dependence, we hypothesize the impact of a firm’s DL capabilities on exploratory innovation and how DL capabilities interact with conventional pathbreaking activities such as technical assets and inter-firm relationships. Our empirical investigations, based on a novel DL capabilities measure constructed from comprehensive datasets on AI conferences and patents, show that DL capabilities have positive impacts on exploratory innovation. The results also show that extant technological assets (i.e., structured data management capabilities) and inter-firm relationships remedy the constraints on a firm’s innovation-seeking behaviors and that these path-breaking activities negatively moderate the positive impact of DL capabilities on exploratory innovation. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale empirical study to investigate how DL affects exploratory innovation, contributing to the emerging literature on AI and innovation.

Generative AI and Creator Economy: Investigating the Effects of AI-Generated Voice on Online Video Creation

Zhang, Xiaoke, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “Generative AI and Creator Economy: Investigating the Effects of AI-Generated Voice on Online Video Creation”, R&R at Management Science.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the creative industry by reshaping the human creative process. We explore the potential of generative AI in the creator economy by investigating the effects of AI-generated voice adoption on creators’ productivity and creative patterns on TikTok, one of the world’s largest video-sharing platforms. Using a unique dataset of 554,252 videos from 4,691 TikTok creators, we conduct multimodal analyses of the video data to detect the adoption of AI voice and to quantify video characteristics. We then estimate the adoption effects using a stacked difference-in-differences model coupled with propensity score matching. Our results suggest that AI voice adoption significantly increases creator productivity. This effect is larger among less experienced or less popular creators, suggesting an equalizing effect of generative AI. Moreover, we find that the use of AI voice enhances video novelty across image, audio, and text modalities, especially among experienced creators, suggesting its role in reducing routine workload and fostering creative exploration. Lastly, our study also uncovers a disinhibition effect, where creators conceal their identities with the AI voice and exert more negative sentiments because of diminished social image concerns. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how generative AI reshapes online video creation.

Ideas are Easy but Execution is Everything: Measuring the Impact of Stated AI Strategies and Capability on Firm Innovation Performance

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee (2022) “Ideas are Easy but Execution is Everything: Measuring the Impact of Stated AI Strategies and Capability on Firm Innovation Performance”, Work-in-Progress.

Contrary to the promise that AI will transform various industries, there are conflicting views on the impact of AI on firm performance. We argue that existing AI capability measures have two major limitations, limiting our understanding of the impact of AI in business. First, existing measures on AI capability do not distinguish between stated strategies and actual AI implementations. To distinguish stated AI strategy and actual AI capability, we collect various AI-related data sources, including AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), patent filings (USPTO), inter-firm transactions related to AI adoption (FactSet), and AI strategies stated in 10-K annual reports. Second, while prior studies identified successful AI implementation factors (e.g., data integrity and intelligence augmentation) in a general context, little is known about the relationship between AI capabilities and in-depth innovation performance. We draw on the neo-institutional theory to articulate the firm-level AI strategies and construct a fine-grained AI capability measure that captures the unique characteristics of AI-strategy. Using our newly proposed AI capability measure and a novel dataset, we will study the impact of AI on firm innovation, contributing to the nascent literature on managing AI.

Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market (ICIS 2022)

Kwon, Soonjae, Gene Moo Lee, Dongwon Lee, Sung-Hyuk Park (2024) “Digital Cupid: Empowering Generative AI for Fair and Efficient Matchmaking,” Working Paper.

  • Previous title: Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market
  • Presentations: DS (2021), AIMLBA (2021), WITS (2021), ICIS (2022)
  • Preliminary version in ICIS 2022 Proceedings
  • Based on an industry collaboration

With the increasing prevalence of online transactions, enhancing matching efficiency has emerged as a critical objective for most matching platforms. However, these efforts often lead to decreased fairness, making it challenging to balance these two elements. This study presents a novel generative AI-based approach to increase the platform’s efficiency and fairness simultaneously in the context of online dating. By developing a model that utilizes users’ multimodal features to predict individual preferences, we assess the impact of various matching algorithms on platform efficiency and fairness. Extensive simulations show that our fairness-aware algorithm significantly enhances both metrics, addressing conventional methods’ severe efficiency-fairness tradeoff issue. We also introduce a novel generative AI-based personalization technique that modifies users’ profile images in different directions according to their counterparts, further boosting efficiency without sacrificing fairness. Our matching framework can be applied to platforms with various objectives, contributing to all stakeholders in digital platforms.

My thoughts on AI, Big Data, and IS Research

Last update: June 10th, 2021

Recently, I had a chance to share my thoughts on how Big Data Analytics and AI will impact Information Systems (IS) research. Thanks to ever-growing datasets (public and proprietary) and powerful computational resources (cloud API, open-source projects), AI and Big Data will be important in IS research in the foreseeable future. If you are an aspiring IS researcher, I believe that you should be able to embrace this and take advantage of this.

First, AI and Big Data are powerful “tools” for IS research. It could be intimidating to see all the fancy new AI techniques. But they are just tools to analyze your data. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to use them. There are many open-source projects in Python and R that you can use to analyze your data. Also, many cloud services (e.g., Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud ML, Microsoft Azure ML) allow you to use pre-trained AI models at a modest cost (that your professors can afford). What you need is some working knowledge in programming languages like Python and R. And a high-level understanding of the idea behind algorithms.

Don’t shy away from hands-on programming. Using AI and Big Data tools may not be a competitive advantage in the long run because of the democratization of AI tools. However, I believe it will be the new baseline. So you need to have it in your research toolbox. Specifically, I believe that IS researchers should have a working knowledge of Python/R programming and Linux environment. I recommend these online courses: Data Science, Machine Learning, Linux, SQL, and NoSQL.

Second, AI and Big Data Analytics are creating a lot of interesting new “phenomenon” in personal lives, firms, and societies. How AI and robots will be adopted in the workplace and how that will affect the labor market? Are we losing our jobs? Or can we improve our productivity with AI tools? How AI will be used in professional services by the experts? What are the unintended consequences (such as biases, security, privacy, misinformation) of AI adoptions in the organization and society? And how can we mitigate such issues? There are so many new and interesting research questions.

In order to conduct relevant research, I think that IS researchers should closely follow the emerging technologies. Again, it could be hard to keep up with all the advances. I try to keep up to date by reading industry reports (from McKinsey and Deloitte) and listening to many podcasts (e.g., Freakonomics Radio, a16 Podcasts by Andreessen Horowitz, Lex Fridman Podcast, Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, HBR’s Exponential View by Azeem Azhar).

I hope this post may help new IS researchers shape their research strategies. I will try to keep updating this post. Cheers!