Edge AI Driven Technology Advancements Paving Way Towards New Capabilities

As industries hold the opportunity to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) driven innovation, their success to a significant extent will depend on the value the new technology generates for different business stakeholder groups. This is in turn dependent upon how management can embrace these techniques and change as companies will frequently need to transform both internal processes and offerings to customers in order to reap the benefits of AI. AI is a growing research area currently concentrated around technology and modeling of techniques and yet only few examples and limited research are available, on how AI technology enables new capabilities that can impact the value delivered as well as radically transform it. We thus need to understand what new capabilities these technologies bring about and how they are used. Based on three concrete empirical quasi-experiments, interviews conducted with start-ups and a Swedish industrial manufacturing firm dealing with outdoor power products (like grass-cutters, chain-saws, concrete-saws, etc.) for professional and consumer use and using an analytical framework derived from the Resource Based View, this paper explores capabilities enabled through Edge AI and the competitive advantage these may offer. Specific capabilities (self-calibration, enhanced-sensing, selective-capture and reputation) are identified and implications for theory are discussed, pointing out the importance to consider this type of technology not only as a resource, but rather as a dynamic capability in itself.