Structuring the Quest for Strategic Alignment of Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Taxonomy of the Organizational Business Value of AI Use Cases

The deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in businesses is said to provide significant benefits to organizations. However, many businesses struggle to align single AI use cases with the overall strategic business value contribution. Thus, we investigate the strategic characteristics that determine the business value contribution of AI use cases at an organizational level. We draw on academic literature and 106 AI use cases to develop a conceptually sound and empirically grounded taxonomy of the organizational business value of AI use cases. With the developed taxonomy, decision-makers are presented with a tool to systematically align AI use cases with strategic objectives. Moreover, our findings reveal how an AI use case can generate different business value contributions in different contexts, which provides researchers with a conceptual frame for informing their empirical research endeavors at the organizational level.