Fore School of Management

This chapter, The Gen AI Playbook: Redefining Responsible Consumer Engagement Strategies, examines how Gen AI is changing brand-consumer interactions. Gen AI technologies including huge language models, GANs, and diffusion models are examined and compared to marketing AI applications. A strategic five-pillar Gen AI Playbook—Discover, Design, Deliver, Delight, and Decide—guides marketers through insight generation, co-creation, personalization, and real-time optimization. The use cases in retail, FMCG, healthcare, and education show how Gen AI scales hyper-personalized, multi-modal interaction. Ethics, regulation, and AI-generated material overuse are all discussed in the chapter. In conclusion, it predicts Gen AI's use in market research, branding, and consumer interaction.

Purpose The organic reconfiguration in supply chain practices significantly varies with restaurant types, customers and the extent of the degree of serving organic food. The purpose of this study is to develop a quantitative application to measure the degree of serving Organic Food for Restaurant Supply Chains. Design/methodology/approach The detailed semi-structured interviews, onsite visits and secondary customer reviews of 60 restaurants of different sizes, locations and cuisines from India are used to explore typologies of organic supply chains. In the second stage, an approach for evaluating the degree of organic food serving is developed on the basis of Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) attributes, and differences between typologies are statistically tested using non-parametric Mann–Whitney U-test. Findings The results show that the degree of serving organic food differs with the type of restaurants across SCOR attributes. Based on the variations in SC practices, the work presents two types of restaurant supply chains – Organic Food Enthusiast (Type-I) and b) Village Voyagers (Type-II). The difference between the degree of serving organic food for the “Make” and “Enable” attributes is statistically insignificant. Despite variations in the strategic positioning, customer type and geographical context, both the organic supply chains tend to preserve their core making process. Practical implications The degree of serving organic food for each individual element of the SCOR model can be used by practitioners and managers to identify specific problems and opportunity areas where practical actions could be defined and taken to improve the organic food-based supply chain reconfiguration. Originality/value This paper proposes the quantitative approach to evaluating organic food serving capabilities of restaurant supply chains. Further, it empirically demonstrates the typologies of organic food serving supply chains.

Exploring the economic-environmental nexus is important for devising effective economic policies, particularly for small, resource-constrained emerging nations with evolving institutional quality (IQ). This study examines the impact of economic growth (EG), foreign direct investment (FDI), trade openness (TO), and IQ on CO2 emissions in Comoros from 1990 to 2022. The study employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to ascertain the short-term and long-term effects. Further, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) regression approaches are used for robust interpretations. The study finds a long-run cointegration among the variables. The estimation further reveals that TO deteriorates, while FDI enhances, and the impact of EG on environmental quality is statistically insignificant. Contrary to our expectations, IQ worsens the environmental quality in the long run, reflecting weak environmental regulations. Based on these empirical results, the study concludes that the economic-environmental nexus results in environmental degradation in Comoros, advising regulators to reduce harmful trade and exercise rigorous control in implementing environmental regulations to achieve environmental sustainability.

Purpose This paper aimed to categorize the drivers, sub-drivers, barriers and sub-barriers of corporate engagement with start-ups (CEWS) and prioritize them in order of their significance and impact. CEWS has gained prominence in the context of open innovation, and it privileges non-equity-based engagements between incumbents and start-ups. Design/methodology/approach We followed a three-stage approach in this study. First, relevant literature was reviewed to identify the drivers, sub-drivers, barriers and sub-barriers of CEWS. This helped in clustering five drivers and four barriers into corresponding sub-drivers and sub-barriers categories of CEWS. Thereafter, the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed to prioritize various drivers and barriers of CEWS. Finally, to ensure the strength and robustness of the results, a sensitivity analysis of the drivers and barriers of CEWS was performed. Findings The results of the current study highlight that the strategic alignment and resource drivers are the most significant among the main drivers contributing to the success of the CEWS. The three most enabling sub-drivers were found to be vision alignment, capital needs of start-ups, and value proposition alignment. Among the main barriers, partnership incoherence and incoherent strategic intent were found to be the most significant barriers to CEWS. Correspondingly, incompatibility between partners, as in differences in the value systems and goal ambiguity, emerged as the most critical sub-barriers that may derail the CEWS outcomes. Practical implications The hierarchical mapping of drivers and barriers will assist practitioners and managers of incumbents and start-ups to create effective roadmaps in their engagement efforts. Originality/value Despite the growing research in the CEWS domain, little is known about the efficacy of the drivers and barriers of CEWS and how they affect outcomes. This study makes an original contribution in categorizing and prioritizing the drivers and barriers of CEWS to demonstrate that a hierarchy exists among the drivers and barriers.

ABSTRACT The objectives of this paper are manifold: first, to explore the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the financial performance of hospitality companies (hotels and entertainment), and second, to assess how this relationship is shaped by environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. Drawing on a comprehensive international dataset from 14 developed countries spanning 2013 to 2022, the study contributes to the emerging literature on ESG and EPU by analysing how ESG factors influence the link between EPU and corporate financial performance through dynamic panel data regression. Findings of the study indicate that the policy‐related uncertainty has a detrimental impact on the financial performance of hospitality companies. Furthermore, this relationship is not restricted to the current financial performance only; in fact, the detrimental impact of policy‐related uncertainty sustains at 1‐year lagged level, thereby affecting negatively the subsequent year's financial performance. Interestingly, companies with high scores in overall ESG, as well as in individual environmental or governance dimensions, do not perform better during periods of heightened uncertainty compared to those with lower sustainability scores. However, firms with socially solid performance manage to navigate rising business uncertainty more effectively, implying that hospitality firms should value their employees and create an environment of inclusivity and growth for them to succeed.