Generative AI ‐Driven Supply Chain Digital Innovation: Enabling Integration, Resilience, and Sustainable Business Value Creation
ABSTRACT In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment, organizations face mounting pressure to develop agile and resilient supply chains capable of withstanding increasingly frequent disruptions. At the same time, sustainability has evolved into a strategic necessity, requiring firms to balance competitiveness with economic, social, and environmental responsibility. Against this backdrop, Generative‐Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has emerged as a transformative digital capability with the potential to drive innovation, strengthen integration, enhance resilience, and support sustainable value creation. Despite growing interest, empirical evidence examining the multi‐dimensional effects of GAI within emerging economy supply chains remains limited. Responding to this gap, this study investigates how GAI‐enabled digital innovation shapes supply chain integration and resilience in Malaysian manufacturing firms. The analysis is grounded in the resource‐based view, positioning GAI as a valuable, rare, and hard‐to‐imitate resource that facilitates the development of integrated digital capabilities. Complementing this, dynamic capabilities theory frames GAI as an enabler that allows firms to sense, seize, and reconfigure operational processes in response to disruptions, thereby enhancing resilience and long‐term sustainability. Data was collected through structured surveys and analyzed using Partial‐Least Squares Structural‐Equation‐Modeling (PLS‐SEM). The findings reveal both direct and mediated pathways through which GAI contributes to sustainable business value. Specifically, GAI advances digital innovation, which subsequently strengthens integration and resilience capabilities centrally to navigating disruptions and achieving sustainable outcomes. This study offers one of the earliest empirical examinations integrating GAI, digital innovation, supply chain integration, resilience, and sustainability, providing actionable insights for practitioners, policymakers, and technology providers operating within resource‐constrained contexts.
Authors
- Mahmood Ali (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6408-6657)
- Arsalan Zahid Piprani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6321-8029)
- Sumona Mukhuty (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2408-7123)
- Jyri Vilko (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9906-0470)
- Sajid Nazir (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4664-443X)
Institutions
- Northumbria University (GB)
- Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (FI)
- Leeds Beckett University (GB)
- Sunway University (MY)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Sustainable Development
- Published
- 2026-09-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.71607
- Primary Topic
- Digital Transformation in Industry
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00