Organizations increasingly adopt AI to enhance innovation, yet many initiatives underdeliver - not because the technology fails, but because coordination between humans and AI breaks down. This paper develops a framework reconceptualizing AI as a teammate rather than a tool. Analyzing 37 empirical studies, we identify five coordination breakpoints that trace back to two critical junctures: directional alignment fails, when humans and AI pursue different goals, and information integrity fails, when meaning degrades as tasks move across human-AI boundaries. Building on these insights, we introduce a Practical Coordination Playbook that provides targeted interventions across five organizational domains - including capability boundary mapping workshops, executive strategy alignment sessions, and multi-channel data integration systems. Conceptually, the paper unifies fragmented accounts of implementation challenges into a parsimonious model; managerially, it provides guidance for converting possible breakpoints into deliberate teaming capabilities; methodologically, it offers a transparent, reproducible synthesis of the empirical record. Taken together, the findings highlight that the future of human-AI innovation depends not only on more powerful systems but on how organizations design the conditions for AI to act as a trusted teammate.

Ongoing efforts to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), such as the recently adopted European AI Act, are affecting organizations that are already hard-pressed to increase their AI readiness. While many fear that such regulations will stifle AI innovation, we argue that they instead set guardrails for, rather than present barriers to, AI initiatives. Thus, organizations need to urgently start preparations for compliance with the AI Act and similar regulations while ensuring continued AI initiative success. In this article, we provide the “AI Act Readiness Framework”, a 2x2 matrix to help organizations map their current AI Act readiness and outline four strategies toward compliant AI initiatives. The framework provides a structured approach to move from low to high AI Act readiness by focusing on achieving clarity regarding legal obligations and compliance. We outline five managerial recommendations that organizations could employ for increased AI Act readiness. In doing so, this paper contributes not only with a framework for organizations aiming to assess their readiness in relation to AI regulation, but also to a future where AI is developed in responsible ways.

Most existing literature on business and crisis frames a crisis as a singular event that a business must navigate to survive or thrive. What we do not know is how firms survive through a series of intersecting and overlapping crises (i.e., a polycrisis environment) and how their strategies differ when operating amid perpetual crises. In Lebanon, overlapping crises grounded in weak political institutions, economic instability, and disasters have profoundly impacted small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Beirut SMEs operate in a complex urban environment, where neighboring conflicts, urban insecurity, and sectarian divisions impact operations. These firms are often promoted in economic development discourses as engines of resilient livelihood creation, but do SMEs negotiate these conditions in productive ways for the community, and can a perpetual crisis operating mentality deliver positive societal or economic dividends? This article addresses these questions by developing a framework that conceptualizes SME strategies for perpetual crises that draws on 34 in-depth qualitative interviews with SME owners in Beirut. We found that SMEs use nuanced strategies to contend with multidimensional crises that are distinct from singular crisis approaches and discuss how urban crises may shape our understanding of SMEs as peace and development actors. We use these findings to advance theory on the role of SMEs in perpetual crisis and on how survival strategies in such settings can upend business resilience.

What if your brand’s ambassador or celebrity endorser could hold personalized conversations with your worldwide audience, in any language, at any time, without ever setting foot in a studio? Digital Human Avatars (DHAs) are an emerging AI-facilitated avatar technology which combines advanced form and behavioral realism to deliver human-like and interactive engagement experiences. This conceptual article assists managers in exploring DHAs as interactive representations of brand ambassadors or public figures for engagement. We introduce DHAs, how they operate, and their increasing deployment in marketing contexts to engage audiences. We provide a balanced examination of the implications of DHAs by discussing key opportunities (e.g., multilingual reach, enhanced realism) and key risks (e.g., security vulnerabilities, legal and ethical concerns) DHAs present to managers. We conclude with presenting managers with five key strategic considerations for DHA implementation ( Augmentation not replacement, balance representativeness, contextual alignment, appropriate disclosure, and privacy protection for both users and public figures ) and provide specific managerial recommendations for each consideration.