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California Management Review
Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest-Editors:

Michael Haenlein, ESCP Europe Business School Paris, France
Andreas Kaplan, ESCP Europe Business School Berlin, Germany

Artificial Intelligence (AI), which was established as an academic discipline in the 1950s, has remained an area of relatively obscure scientific and limited practical interest for around half a century. Today, driven by the arrival of Big Data and rapid improvements in computing power, it has entered the business space and public conversation. Voices describing AI vary from euphoric praise to highly alarming warnings. On the one hand, Raymond Kurzweil, Google’s Chief Engineer and Futurist, proclaims that AI will not displace humans, but enhance them. On the other hand, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, thinks that AI will be a greater risk than North Korea and potentially lead to World War III. Balancing these extreme views Stephen Hawking stated that AI can “either be the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”.

Leaving such fundamental opinions aside, several real-world cases have shown the tremendous power that AI represents for companies. Facebook uses AI for facial recognition to make its applications better than humans in identifying if two pictures are from the same person. And motorbike manufacturer Harley-Davidson increased New York sales leads almost 30 fold from less than 5 to around 40 per day through AI enabled hyper-targeted and customized communications. These examples show that Artificial Intelligence, in addition to being a hot topic and buzz word, has made its way into a variety of organizations and has become top of mind for many corporations and institutions. However, a lot of questions are still unsolved. Indeed, the more AI enters the world of business, the more questions arise.

The aim of this Special Issue is to analyze the impact of Artificial Intelligence on a broad range of business and management subjects (ranging from Finance, Marketing, Strategy, to Innovation and Entrepreneurship and covering a multitude of different sectors) and offer guidance to organizations on how to best use AI for sustainable value creation. Proposals can be based on all types of research, disciplinary or interdisciplinary, conceptual or empirical (qualitative or quantitative). Some exemplary questions that this Special Issue intends to answer include but are not limited to:

• What are the general effects of AI on companies and institutions?
• How will AI impact the current logic of business models?
• How should AI be used in order to create value?
• How will AI combined with the multitude of personal data provided on Social Media change business and management as we know it?
• How will the management function change through the use of AI?
• What are potential negative effects of AI and how to overcome them?
• What ethical questions emerge from the arrival of AI?
• What legal considerations need to be taken into account in the context of AI?
• How should governments deal with and prepare the spreading of AI?
• What will AI’s impact be on specific business domains such as Accounting, Communications, Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Operations, and the Supply Chain? And how will AI influence specific sectors such as Education, Energy, Health Care, Public Administration, and Tourism?

Authors should submit a full manuscript no later than September 30, 2018 to the attention of Michael Haenlein (haenlein@escpeurope.eu) and Andreas M. Kaplan (kaplan@escpeurope.eu). Manuscripts should run between 5,000 and 9,000 words, double-spaced, font-size 12. Additional CMR submission guidelines can be found at http://cmr.berkeley.edu/submit/requirements.html. Manuscripts should clearly state

1. the purpose of the study;
2. the particular innovation and/or entrepreneurial management issue addressed;
3. the context in which this particular innovation and/or entrepreneurial management issue is examined (i.e. real names of companies need to be cited unless the contribution is intended to be conceptual);
4. the relevance of the study for practitioners, academic scholars, and CMR readership.

Based on these submissions, the Guest Editors will select a subset that is most likely to result in first-rate, high-impact submissions. Authors of those selected submissions will be invited to submit their paper online through the CMR submission portal by November 30, 2018 to be peer reviewed.

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