The why and what of AI deployment and innovation in companies - results and learning from a systematic literature research enlightened by the capability theory

Despite soaring interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), only one-tenth of companies have reported tangible business results. We conducted a Systematic Literature Research on peer-reviewed reports to establish an updated status and baseline of AI deployment for research and companies. We analysed selected peer-reviewed articles for deployment objectives, approaches, results, and learnings. This research confirms that AI is still at the early stages of deployment and innovation in companies. Deploying AI successfully represents a management — rather than a technology — challenge. It requires more cognisance, innovation, learning, and effort than generally thought. Through the results and a novel conceptual framework, this research increases the knowledge and emphasises the importance of the pre-deployment from theoretical and practical viewpoints. The Sensing stage of the Dynamic Capability theory aligns well with the developed pre-deployment concept. We propose several research topics to increase the knowledge and theoretical understanding of deploying AI cognisably for business and stakeholder benefits.