Tag Archives: IS strategy

The New Industrial Revolution: AI, Labor Unions, and the Future of Work

Park, Jiyong, Myunghwan Lee, Yoonseock Son, Gene Moo Lee “The New Industrial Revolution: AI, Labor Unions, and the Future of Work”, Work-in-Progress.

  • First three authors equally contributed to the work.
  • Presentations: CIST (2024), WISE (2024).

As a general-purpose technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has profoundly transformed the human labor landscape with its capability to perform complex tasks. Despite ongoing debates about AI’s role in the future of work, there remains a limited understanding of how a firm’s endeavors to strengthen its AI capabilities interweave with its workforce. Reflecting on the ongoing role of labor unions in responding to technological advancements, we investigate the impact of unionization on AI investments and their subsequent effects on firm value. Utilizing datasets on labor elections and AI-skilled labor, we construct measures for unionization and AI investment. Based on a regression discontinuity design framework, our results indicate that while AI investments lead to an improvement in firm value, unionization decreases AI investments in the following 5 years, implying that labor unions have an indirect negative impact on firm value by hampering AI investments. We also provide suggestive evidence of the competition between firms and labor unions in resource allocation between AI investments and employment as a potential mechanism through which labor unions may hinder AI investments. This research advances our understanding of corporate AI strategies by recognizing labor unions as a crucial stakeholder, enriching the discourse on the literature on the business value of AI and IT.

Jaecheol Park’s PhD Proposal: Strategic Roles of AI and Mobile Management on Performance: Evidence from U.S. Public Firms

Jaecheol Park (2024) “Strategic Roles of AI and Mobile Management on Performance: Evidence from U.S. Public Firms”, Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal, University of British Columbia. https://jaecheol-park.github.io/

Supervisor: Gene Moo Lee

Supervisory Committee Members: J. Frank Li, Jiyong Park (Georgia)

The integration of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mobile IT into the workplace is transforming how businesses operate. Despite the increasing prevalence and importance of AI and mobile IT, there is limited research on how firms can strategically manage these technologies to achieve competitive advantage and enhance performance. This dissertation consists of two large-scale empirical studies on U.S. public firms, aiming to provide new theoretical and managerial insights into how firms can harness the power of these technologies to drive success.

The first chapter investigates the impact of mobile device management (MDM) on firm performance during the recent pandemic, highlighting the importance of MDM in digital resilience. Drawing on the resource-based view and a novel proprietary dataset from a global MDM 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. This study contributes to the work-from-home and hybrid work literature by emphasizing the business value of MDM and its crucial role in building digital resilience.

The second chapter investigates the effect of AI strategic orientation on firm performance with a dual lens on product and process orientation. We create a novel measure of AI orientation by employing a large language model to assess business descriptions in Form 10-K filings, and identify an increasing trend of AI disclosure among U.S. public firms. By dissecting firms’ AI disclosure into AI washing and AI (product and process) orientation, our long-difference analyses show that AI orientation significantly affects costs, sales, and market value but AI washing does not, showing the importance of strategic deployment of AI to create business value. Moreover, we find the heterogeneous effects between AI product and process orientation on performance. This study contributes to the recent AI management literature by providing the strategic role of AI orientation on firm performance.

The findings of the dissertation offer valuable insights for academics, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to understand and leverage these emerging technologies’ full potential. From an academic perspective, this dissertation contributes to the literature on the business value of IT and AI by empirically demonstrating the business value of MDM and AI strategies. From an industry perspective, this research provides actionable guidance for businesses looking to leverage the power of MDM and AI to achieve strategic goals and drive success in the digital age.

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

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

  • Presentations: UBC (2024), CIST (2024), INFORMS (2024)

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies hold great potential for large-scale economic impact. Aligned with this trend, recent studies explore the adoption impact of AI technologies on firm performance. However, they predominantly measure AI capabilities with input (e.g., labor/job posting), neglecting to consider the strategic use of such AI input in business operations and value creation. In this paper, we empirically examine how firms’ strategic AI orientation affects firm performance with a dual-lens on product and process orientation. We create a novel firm-year-level AI orientation measure by employing a large language model to analyze business descriptions in Form 10-K filings and identify an increasing trend of AI disclosure among U.S. public firms. By further dissecting firms’ AI disclosure into AI mention and AI (product and process) orientation, our long-difference analyses show that AI orientation significantly affects costs, sales, and market value but AI mention does not, showing the importance of strategic deployment of AI to create business value. Moreover, we find the heterogeneous effects across AI product orientation and AI process orientation on performance. This study contributes to the recent AI management literature by providing the strategic role of AI orientation on firm performance.

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.

  • 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 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.

Strategic Competitive Positioning: An Unsupervised Structural Hole-based Firm-specific Measure

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee, Hasan Cavusoglu, Marc-David L. Seidel. “Strategic Competitive Positioning: Unsupervised Operationalization of a Structural Hole-based Firm-specific Construct”, [Latest version: Aug 15, 2023]

  • doc2vec model of 10-K reports: Link
  • Presented at UBC MIS Seminar 2018, CIST 2019 (Seattle, WA), KrAIS 2019 (Munich, Germany), DS 2021 (online), KrAIS 2021 (Austin, TX), UT Dallas 2022, KAIST 2022, Korea Univ 2022, INFORMS 2022 (Indianapolis, IN)
  • Funded by Sauder Exploratory Grant 2019
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Sahil Jain

In this paper, we build on the network structural hole concept of organizational theory to theorize an individual firm-specific strategic competitive positioning (SCP) construct. We use unsupervised document embedding approaches to operationalize the SCP construct by capturing each firm’s relative competitive and strategic positioning in a strategic similarity matrix of all existing U.S. publicly traded firms’ annual corporate filings. This approach enables us to construct a theoretically driven firm-level SCP measure with minimal human expert intervention. Our construct dynamically captures competitive positioning across different firms and years without using artificially bounded and often outdated industry classification systems. We illustrate how the dynamic measure captures industry-level and cross-industry strategic changes. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our construct with an empirical analysis showing the imprinting and dynamic effects of SCP on firm performance. The results show that our dynamic SCP measure outperforms existing competition measures and successfully predicts post-IPO performance. This paper makes significant contributions to the information systems and organizations literatures by proposing an organizational theory-based unsupervised approach to dynamically conceptualize and measure firm-level strategic competitive positioning. The construct can be easily applied to firm-specific, industry-level, and cross-industry research questions in many contexts across many disciplines.