The artificial intelligence, digital economy, and global connectivity: Implications and lessons for international entrepreneurship

This article explores the interacting impacts of economic digitization, artificial intelligence (AI), global communication and information technologies (ICTs) raising digital global connectivity, and causing profound change in global buyers’ and suppliers’ corresponding behaviors, expectations, and operations. The increased transparency of global information has enabled global buyers to identify globally competitive suppliers that offer them the highest perceived values, at the lowest overall cost, with highly satisfactory transactional services through simple online searches, at times involving AI. In response, suppliers’ increasingly AI-augmented manufacturing processes are producing higher-valued goods (and services), at lower costs, complemented along with increasingly more satisfactory supportive transactional services, which are attracting more global customers, regardless of their respective time and locations. Such highly potent corporate strategies are generating higher sales revenues, resulting from higher scale and scope economies that are producing higher consumer values at lower costs, enforcing a deeper deployment of AI-induced corporate strategies, including more responsive and satisfactory consumer services, which are in turn generating more satisfaction all around.