From Capability to Care: Sense‐Breaking, Sense‐Giving, and Strategic Flexibility as Drivers of Ethical, Autonomy‐Preserving AI Personalization

ABSTRACT AI‐driven personalization now structures search, recommendation, pricing, and service across the consumer journey, heightening a core dilemma: maximizing relevance and efficiency without compromising autonomy and trust. This article advances a capability‐based account of responsible personalization. I theorize that technology sense‐breaking (challenging legacy assumptions) and sense‐giving (constructing shared meanings) foster strategic flexibility, which, in turn, enables two outcomes: (a) product/process innovation performance and (b) consumer‐facing safeguards that calibrate trust—transparent AI disclosure, adjustable recommendation intensity, and human‐override/redress mechanisms. I further argue that transformational leadership amplifies the translation of sensemaking into flexibility, steering reconfiguration toward “engagement without coercion.” A firm‐level, multi‐respondent survey of Taiwan‐based organizations adopting AI/Web3 in marketing and service contexts is used to test a moderated‐mediation model with validated multi‐item measures and PLS‐SEM, alongside power checks, CMV diagnostics, and robustness analyses. By endogenizing UX governance within organizational capabilities and leadership, the study links internal reconfiguration to external consumer dignity, specifying when firms are most likely to implement autonomy‐preserving designs. The contribution is a precise, operational blueprint for aligning market performance with ethical experience through capability formation and trust calibration