Artificial intelligence-based digital transformation for sustainable societies: the prevailing effect of COVID-19 crises

Abstract

Digital transformation (DT) is becoming a necessity for enterprises in different industries all over the world. The necessity for DT turned out to be inevitable with the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. On March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the COIVD-19 as global pandemic that caused thousands of deaths and brought the world to a standstill with huge economic burden (World Health Organization, 2020). This pandemic accelerated the need for organizations to transform using extensive digitization in response to the unprecedented change (Morgan, 2020). However, significant obstacles still encounter these organizations when it comes to recommending the necessary changes to make the digital leap. In today’s artificial intelligence age, digital transformation has enormous impact across societies (Nambisan, 2019; George & Paul, 2020; Majchrzak, Markus, Wareham, 2016); organizations need to realize that both digital transformation and artificial intelligence have to go hand in hand to help achieve prosperous digital transformation (Wuest et al., 2020). Therefore, becoming a digital enterprise is much more than investing in latest digital technologies. It is about adopting artificial intelligence to support the business strategy (Joda et al. 2020), searching for new business models (Kotarba, 2018), and considering afresh how to embed the social impact in the measure of the success of the business.