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Welcome to AIS Insights

Research for the AI Transformation
The AIS Insights editors · AIS Insights · 2026
  • AIS Insights, an initiative of the Association for Information Systems, brings current Information Systems research to practice, where leaders need it most in times of AI.
  • Every insight starts from a question digital leaders face in practice, answers it with the study's findings, and says what they mean for five roles: CIO or IT executive, IT manager, business strategist, researcher and policymaker.
  • Each study comes three ways: the key question and findings to read, a short episode to listen to, and its core idea in one visual, all in eleven languages.
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What it means for you:

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79 insights from AIS journals, conferences and related outlets

Illustration for: How can digital experimentation platforms help city leaders make better, more adaptive urban sustainability policies?

Key question

How can digital experimentation platforms help city leaders make better, more adaptive urban sustainability policies?

How to Cope with the Dynamics of Urban Sustainability: Urban Experimentation Platforms as Tools for Adaptive Policy-Making
Rehm, McLoughlin, Donnellan · ECIS · 2022
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive Audit current urban data platforms to ensure they include incoming feedback channels from local experimentation trials, rather than functioning solely as one-way broadcast tools.
  • IT Manager Configure dashboard alerts to aggregate and flag real-time stakeholder feedback and usage metrics from ongoing urban sustainability pilots.
  • Business Strategist Initiate a meeting with municipal authorities and local business ecosystem partners to design a recurring framework for collaborative problem-solving using platform data.
  • Researcher Apply system dynamics modeling to map the existing stakeholder feedback loops within your city's active urban experimentation platforms.
  • Policymaker Review the latest data reports from active local sustainability trials and draft a plan to update an existing municipal policy based on the trial results.
Operations & Supply Chain
Illustration for: What causes organizational inertia during digital transformation, and how does it block successful change?

Key question

What causes organizational inertia during digital transformation, and how does it block successful change?

Understanding Inertia in Digital Transformation: A Literature Review and Multilevel Research Framework
Haskamp, Dremel, Marx, et al. · ICIS · 2021
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive Audit your portfolio for socio-technical legacy IT misalignments by scheduling a joint review with department heads to identify legacy systems anchoring obsolete business routines.
  • IT Manager Map your team's current project workflows against the five inertia attributes to pinpoint where cognitive and behavioral rigidity is slowing down daily software deployment.
  • Business Strategist Review the 12 documented inertia antecedents against your current transformation roadmap to identify which cultural and structural barriers threaten your upcoming business model renewal.
  • Researcher Formulate a new empirical study focusing on the interactions between individual-level cognitive inertia and organizational-level structural inertia during enterprise cloud migrations.
  • Policymaker Draft guidelines for state-backed digital grants that require organizations to explicitly account for socio-technical and cultural inertia mitigation strategies before receiving funding.
Operations & Supply Chain
Illustration for: How do sending and receiving emails shape employee stress and productivity?

Key question

How do sending and receiving emails shape employee stress and productivity?

Email stress: Towards a new understanding of its causes and impacts
Stich · Systèmes d'Information et Management · 2025
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, initiate a discussion with your direct reports and heads of departments to explore piloting a specific email management training program for all employees, focusing on techniques that address both sender eustress and receiver distress, as outlined by the TMES model.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, review the current email client settings and identify opportunities to implement or enhance features that automatically categorize or filter incoming emails based on sender or keywords, thereby reducing receiver distress for your team.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, draft a proposal for a new organizational communication norm that encourages concise and action-oriented email content from senders, aiming to maximize sender eustress by clearly delegating tasks and minimizing receiver distress caused by ambiguity.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, begin drafting a research proposal to empirically test the TMES model by designing a study that measures sender eustress and receiver distress across different organizational contexts and email usage patterns.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, schedule a meeting with key stakeholders to discuss the development of an organizational policy that mandates specific email etiquette training, emphasizing balanced sender and receiver perspectives as informed by the TMES framework.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Illustration for: How do communities use social media to support mental health recovery during natural disasters?

Key question

How do communities use social media to support mental health recovery during natural disasters?

Digital Mental Health Resilience During Natural Disasters: A Scoping Review and Research Agenda
Islam, Marx, Liu, et al. · ACIS · 2025
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, schedule a brief exploratory meeting with your innovation team to assess existing social media monitoring tools and identify potential enhancements for detecting and analyzing distress signals and misinformation during simulated disaster scenarios.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, review the current moderation policies for any public-facing community forums or social media channels managed by your organization, and identify specific criteria related to 'vulnerability-sensitive content' that could be integrated into moderation guidelines.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, initiate a conversation with your communications and marketing teams to explore how your organization's social media presence could be adapted to proactively offer mental health resources or foster supportive community interactions, especially in light of potential regional disaster risks.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, begin drafting a concise summary of the 'vulnerability-sensitive channels' and 'cross-sector coordination' findings from this review, identifying specific examples or hypothetical scenarios where these could be applied to digital mental health resilience research.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, draft a short memo to your relevant department heads, flagging the research finding on 'communities actively curate content and self-regulate online spaces' and suggesting a brief discussion on how public digital platforms could be better designed or supported to facilitate this self-regulation for mental health resilience during crises.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Illustration for: How can organizations define and select performance indicators for collaborative business networks?

Key question

How can organizations define and select performance indicators for collaborative business networks?

Managing Performance in Collaborative Networks: A Method for Defining Key Performance Indicators for Collaborative Business Models
van de Ven, Machado, Aysolmaz, et al. · Business & Information Systems Engineering · 2026
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, initiate a pilot project to apply the three-step KPI definition method to one specific collaborative network your organization participates in, focusing on identifying and documenting initial network-level KPIs using your existing data infrastructure.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, schedule a working session with a key business stakeholder from a collaborative project to begin the 'KPI specification' step of the research method, focusing on articulating the desired outcomes for that specific collaboration.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, review the research's findings on differentiating KPI scopes and draft a preliminary list of potential network, subnet, and actor-level KPIs for a newly forming collaborative initiative.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, begin designing a case study to apply and further refine the proposed KPI definition method within a new collaborative business scenario, focusing on the 'multi-criteria KPI selection' and 'attribute operationalization' steps.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, identify a specific public-private collaborative initiative and begin exploring how the research's approach to KPI definition could be adapted to measure its network-wide alignment and individual actor contributions effectively.
Operations & Supply Chain
Illustration for: How do laws banning businesses from suppressing negative reviews affect online customer ratings?

Key question

How do laws banning businesses from suppressing negative reviews affect online customer ratings?

Can Regulation Restore Authenticity? Evidence from Policies Against Online Review Suppression
Sanatizadeh, Burtch, Hong, et al. · Information Systems Research · 2025
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, initiate a review of our internal policies and legal contracts to ensure no clauses inadvertently threaten or discourage customers from providing honest feedback on public review platforms.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, task your team with monitoring online review platforms for any patterns of review suppression tactics being used by our competitors, specifically looking for increases in negative reviews that are quickly removed or challenged.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, analyze recent customer feedback data, particularly any negative reviews received in the last quarter, and assess if there are opportunities to engage with these customers to improve our offerings and address concerns openly.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, identify and gather publicly available datasets on consumer review sentiment and volume for companies in sectors known for aggressive review suppression prior to recent regulatory changes, to replicate or extend the findings on the CRFA.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, schedule a meeting with your legislative staff to discuss potential avenues for expanding regulatory protections to cover other forms of consumer feedback, such as social media comments or product testimonials, building upon the success of the CRFA.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Illustration for: How can AI governance be adapted to fit local cultural and ethical values around the world?

Key question

How can AI governance be adapted to fit local cultural and ethical values around the world?

Toward Cultural–Ethical Fit in AI Governance: A Global Typology of Governance Profiles
Symeonidis, Schneider, Nikiforova · ECIS · 2026
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, schedule a 30-minute deep dive with your legal and ethics teams to identify which of the eight AI governance profiles identified in the research most closely aligns with your organization's current AI development and deployment practices, and flag any immediate misalignments.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, initiate a review of your team's current AI project documentation and development methodologies, specifically looking for instances where decisions about fairness, transparency, or accountability might have been implicitly influenced by a single cultural perspective (e.g., U.S.-centric) and note them for further discussion.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, begin analyzing your organization's key international markets and identify the primary cultural value orientations that characterize them, then cross-reference this with the meta-tensions (social justice vs. economic competitiveness, autonomy vs. security) to anticipate potential governance friction for upcoming AI initiatives.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, begin drafting a short literature review outline focusing on how cultural value orientations (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) have historically shaped the adoption and regulation of other transformative technologies (e.g., the internet, biotechnology) to draw parallels with AI governance.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, review the 'diagnostic decision framework' mentioned in the research, and identify one specific AI guideline (e.g., data privacy regulations) that your jurisdiction currently applies universally, then brainstorm how to adapt its interpretation to better fit the dominant cultural value orientations of your primary constituent groups.
Cybersecurity & Privacy
Illustration for: How does adopting smart speakers change how consumers search for, buy, and consume digital content?

Key question

How does adopting smart speakers change how consumers search for, buy, and consume digital content?

The Voice of Commerce: How Smart Speakers Reshape Digital Content Consumption and Preferences
Son, Oh, Im · MIS Quarterly · 2023
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, task your team with investigating integration points between existing VOD platforms and major smart speaker voice assistant APIs (e.g., Alexa, Google Assistant) to enable seamless content discovery and playback via voice commands.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, analyze the current VOD platform's data infrastructure to identify how to track and log voice-initiated search queries and content playback events, distinguishing them from traditional remote control interactions.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, initiate a brainstorm session to explore new content promotion strategies that leverage voice-activated search, considering how to make titles more discoverable through natural language queries and conversational recommendations.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, begin outlining a follow-up study to quantify the correlation between specific conversational voice interactions (beyond simple search) and increased VOD content consumption, perhaps through A/B testing of voice-guided discovery features.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, convene a working group to assess the potential implications of increased voice-activated content consumption on digital accessibility standards and to explore how to ensure equitable access to content across all user interfaces.
Operations & Supply Chain
Illustration for: How can practitioner researchers overcome the divide between academia and industry to create real-world impact?

Key question

How can practitioner researchers overcome the divide between academia and industry to create real-world impact?

Boundary Spanning and Practical Impact in IS Research: A Bourdieusian Analysis
McCarthy, Scholta, Hausvik, et al. · Information Systems Journal · 2025
What it means for you
  • CIO / IT Executive On Monday morning, schedule a 30-minute meeting with your direct reports to initiate a 'practice impact review' focused on one ongoing IS project. Ask each person to identify one specific academic insight or research finding from a recent external study or internal research initiative that could be directly applied to improve that project's current proof-of-concept or proof-of-value stage, and assign them to explore this application by end of week.
  • IT Manager On Monday morning, identify one specific, recent academic paper or conference proceeding relevant to a current team challenge. Forward this paper to your team with a concise note asking for a brief, 1-2 sentence summary of its most practical takeaway and how it *might* apply to your current proof-of-value stage objective by Tuesday afternoon.
  • Business Strategist On Monday morning, review the key performance indicators (KPIs) of one strategic business initiative currently underway. Identify which KPIs are not meeting expectations and, using the 'proof-of-value' framework, draft a one-page hypothesis on how a novel IS application or process, potentially informed by academic research, could demonstrably improve these specific KPIs within the next quarter.
  • Researcher On Monday morning, select one recent academic publication where you are the lead author and identify its 'proof-of-use' stage potential. Draft a single-slide executive summary that articulates the core problem addressed, the practical solution proposed, and one tangible benefit for a specific industry practitioner role (e.g., IT manager, business analyst), and share it with three relevant practitioner contacts for feedback by Wednesday.
  • Policymaker On Monday morning, review the current grant application criteria for technology innovation funding. Identify if and how 'demonstrable practical impact' is explicitly assessed, and draft a brief proposal to incorporate a specific requirement for applicants to detail their strategy for achieving 'proof-of-value' or 'proof-of-use' within a defined timeframe, alongside theoretical contributions.
Operations & Supply Chain
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