ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, POWER AND DECISION-MAKING IN VENEZUELAN MANAGEMENT: A POSTMODERN READING

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in contemporary management is transforming production processes, decision-making, and the symbolic frameworks through which managers interpret organisational reality. In Venezuela, this transformation is particularly complex, due to economic crises, institutional fragility, environmental volatility, and the need for rapid managerial decisions amid uncertainty. This article analyses the impact of AI from a postmodernist perspective, based on a survey of Venezuelan managers (N=150) from the industrial, commercial and service sectors, selected through convenience sampling due to infrastructural constraints. The findings show primarily the instrumental adoption of AI, oriented towards decision support and operational optimisation, but they also reveal persistent tensions between human intuition and algorithmic recommendation. Ambivalent perceptions regarding dashboards, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and AI’s capacity to faithfully represent organisational reality are identified. From a postmodernist perspective, these results suggest that AI not only automates tasks but also reconfigures the legitimacy of knowledge, managerial subjectivity and power relations within the organisation. The study concludes that the use of AI in Venezuelan management expresses a transition towards hybrid forms of decision-making, where human rationality, algorithmic calculation and adaptation to crisis conditions coexist.