How can firms leverage responsible artificial intelligence to build competitive advantages? The role of supply chain justice and complexity

In highly interconnected supply chains, firms are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their forecasting, resource allocation, and responsiveness. However, opaque and bias-prone algorithms can obscure decision-making processes and undermine collaboration between supply chain partners. Responsible AI, in which AI is designed, developed, and deployed in such a way that ensures its ethical conduct, transparency, and alignment with human values, offers a potential remedy, but its relational effects in supply chains remain unclear. Drawing on organizational justice theory, we test whether supply chain justice, encompassing both distributive and procedural justice, mediates the responsible AI–competitive advantage link, with supply chain complexity as a boundary condition. Survey data from 218 Chinese firms show that responsible AI fosters both distributive and procedural justice, which in turn facilitates firms’ competitive advantages. Further, we identify an asymmetric moderating effect: high supply chain complexity weakens the mediating effect of distributive but not procedural justice. Our study advances the research on AI-enabled supply chains by identifying how ethical AI practices can foster firm performance via supply chain justice and when supply chain complexity weakens this effect. Practically, our findings suggest that in complex supply networks, ensuring transparent and consistent decision-making processes provides a more robust mechanism for sustaining competitive advantages compared with focusing only on outcome allocation.