Designing a Technical Framework for Enabling Enterprise AI Adoption

Despite the obvious benefits of AI adoption, organisations are often hesitant to pursue these technologies. Although this hesitation can be attributed to many factors, one of the most obvious is the inadequacy or unavailability of technical platforms. Although the technical components of AI are at the core of what makes AI powerful, in an organisational context, these components do not exist in isolation. Therefore, consideration should be given to the organisational context in which these technologies exist. Hence, engaged research is often required to obtain practitioners’ input. Given these requirements, following an engaged research approach combined with Design Science Research, the following research question emerges: What are the technical factors organisations should consider when adopting AI? By answering the research question, this study aims to provide organisations with information on the essential enterprise-level technical factors by proposing a layered technical-centred AI adoption framework. Although the importance of social and organisational influence on AI adoption can’t be disregarded, this framework provides a good starting point for organisations who want to focus on the technical aspects of AI adoption. Furthermore, an emancipatory assistant (AI bot or augmented artificial intelligence tool) introduced and developed to evaluate the applicability of the technical factors seemed a powerful method for obtaining continuous feedback as input to improve the framework.