Perceived Benefits, Leadership Engagement and AI Maturity in Polish SMEs: A Socio-Technical Perspective on Sustainable Digital Transformation Under Competitive Pressure

Digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are seen as promising pathways for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to enhance performance while preserving environmental and social resources. This paper identifies organizational determinants of AI maturity that can enable SMEs to use AI in a more sustainable, responsible, and capacity-enhancing manner. AI adoption becomes relevant to sustainability not only because a company adopts advanced technology but because this technology is embedded in leadership practices, employee competencies, interdisciplinary collaboration, and organizational learning. From this perspective, perceived benefits and management commitment are not outcomes of sustainability but mechanisms that help explain how SMEs transition from technological awareness to building organizational capacity. Such capacity building can be a necessary prerequisite for subsequent sustainability-oriented outcomes, such as efficient resource utilization, employee upskilling, responsible AI management, and long-term resilience. We conducted a cross-sectional survey among 402 managers from Polish SMEs (62 micro, 193 small, 147 medium) across manufacturing, services and trade industries. Respondents (mean age ≈ 42.5 years) assessed perceived benefits of AI, engagement of top leadership, AI maturity and competitive pressure. Partial least-squares structural equation modeling revealed that perceived benefits strongly predicted leadership engagement (β = 0.647), explaining 62.8% of its variance. Perceived benefits (β = 0.384) and leadership engagement (β = 0.362) in turn were the key drivers of AI maturity, with the model accounting for 65.5% of variance in AI maturity. Competitive pressure positively but weakly moderated the relationship between perceived benefits and leadership engagement (β = 0.011), while its moderating effect on the relationship between perceived benefits and AI maturity was not significant (β = −0.008). These findings suggest that articulating clear benefits of AI and securing active leadership engagement are more decisive for advancing AI maturity than external competitive pressure. The contribution of the study is to integrate the perceived benefits of AI, top management commitment and AI maturity into a model, empirically validated and interpreted from a socio-technical perspective of sustainable digital transformation in SMEs, while quantifying the moderating role of competitive pressure in the under-researched context of Central and Eastern Europe. For practitioners, investing in awareness of AI’s benefits and developing committed leadership may yield more sustainable digital transformation than reacting solely to external pressures.