ABSTRACT:
Digital platforms are the prevailing architecture of the large-scale online economy. Online sales, digital media, social networks, and crowdsourcing services are all delivered at high volume on such platforms, which enable and regularize the interaction within the ecosystem specific to the purpose of the platform. Massive connectivity, positive network effects, and near-zero marginal costs of user participation are the characteristics that drive this infrastructure. The participants interacting on the platforms are the offeror (owner or operator), end users (often in several categories), and the variety of third-party complementors of the value delivered on the platform. Such complementors may notably include advertisers as the principal monetizers, payment processors, and logistics suppliers. The platformization of a service makes it possible to evolve uniformly its new variants and thus foster progress of the overall economy. Achieving this progress requires continuing research, and the development of platforms and their ecosystems.
Although job crafting by individuals with the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has already resulted in its infusion in many organizations, significant economic effects are as yet to be perceived. The Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) has published numerous papers presenting the leading-edge research on the augmentative use of GenAI. Among these are the works recently included in the Special Section on Cognitive Reapportionment [3]. The works investigating the effectiveness of AI agents as team members [1] and the augmentation of human intelligence by GenAI chatbots [5] advance our knowledge of human-computer symbiosis, so prophetically articulated by Licklider [4]. There are recent assembled anecdotal reports on how individual workers enhance and change their jobs with the use of GenAI [2]. We are at present looking to the use of AI to raise the productivity of the entire economies on the national and global scale. We then have to research the deployment of GenAI in the larger organizational aggregates. With the continuing advancement of GenAI, and the deployment of the large language models (and perhaps their successors) as the frontier AI systems, its benefits can be leveraged by the positive transformation of digital platforms.
The Special Issue (SI) you will read here is complementary to the research of the effects of GenAI on the work of individuals. The theme of the issue is “Generative AI and Its Transformative Value for Digital Platforms.” The Guest Editors, Michael Wessel, Martin Adam, Alexander Benlian, Ann Majchrzak, and Ferdinand Thies have assembled six papers addressing the various aspects of the subject. The Guest Editors preface the issue with their introductory paper that establishes the mechanisms through which the use of GenAI is able to qualitatively transform the value that can be delivered by digital platforms. They proceed to map onto their novel and encompassing framework the papers included in the SI. They also provide an analytical introduction to the papers they and their editorial team have assembled and edited. The SI constitutes an important step in our researching of the aggregate effects of GenAI and offers a roadmap to the future.
The first paper in the general section focuses on the improvement of the information technology (IT)-supported healthcare, and more specifically on the role and enhancement of patient digital feedback. Healthcare delivery systems have to ensure the privacy of patients, who are loath to release the information concerning their treatments. Conversely, the patients in aggregate can benefit significantly from the experience of others with the providers, such as physicians. The authors address this dilemma. Aishwarya Deep Shukla, Jie Mein (JM) Goh, Tianshu Su, Guodong (Gordon) Gao, and Ritu Agarwal present their research, based on a large-scale field experiment augmented by a laboratory treatment, helping us to understand how the patients may be induced to provide meaningful reviews of their experience with the medical practitioners. Certain forms of nudging combined with the announced privacy controls are found to meaningfully contribute to the patients’ willingness to release information in their physician’s reviews. This is clearly important to the overall social welfare, both in informing the potential future patients and in affecting the performance of physicians. When the properly anonymized review databases can be mined, trends can be found both for encouragement and for amelioration.
The implementation of enterprise systems (ES) is a difficult project with lasting and weighty effects. The skillful job crafting by the individual employees, that is their self-initiated modifications of their jobs towards their greater effectiveness, can make a difference between the success and (not infrequent) failure of such long-term projects. We can see how GenAI can be deployed in job crafting in the above-cited article on the variety of the individuals’ uses of the technologies based on the large language models. [2]. In the next paper of the issue, Frank K.Y. Chan, James Y.L. Thong, and Viswanath Venkatesh employ the established theoretical perspectives and their own empirics to show what induces the employees to craft their jobs toward the success of the thorny ES implementations and what are the individual differences in these job transformations.
Our field has significantly contributed over the years to the understanding of the effective coordination of activities within organizations. As coordination is grounded in the communication of information and knowledge, this is at it should be. Here, Jennifer Claggett and Elena Karahanna make another, and novel, contribution to our understanding of the technological affordances enabling coordination. The authors identify and classify the coordination affordances (that may be delivered by IT) and go on to analyze their combinations in the context of the coordination episodes the authors classify. As we know from the modern philosophical schools, much is learned in a breakdown—and indeed the authors contribute to their interpretivist work by considering both successes and failures of coordination. They also identify another form of coordination dependency, beyond the well-known pooled and sequential. The work is a significant novel contribution to our understanding how information systems (IS) can augment humans in their task performance—continuing the theme established by the preceding papers of the issue and opening a new avenue to further research on IT-supported coordination.
The concluding paper studies another aspect of GenAI, that of the creator of digital products. This coda complements well the findings presented in the SI discussed above. Jennifer Rix, Benedikt Berger, Thomas Hess, and Christine Rzepka investigate the comparative valuation by consumers of the digital products created by humans versus those created by algorithms. We may be speaking about a work of literature, art, fashion, or journalism. In their mixed-methods study the researchers in fact base themselves on the news items created, respectively, by humans and machines. The authors find what is called algorithm discount, with consumers ascribing lower value to the creations of machines. The authors analyze the roots of the relative aversion to the algorithm/AI-created products and offer countermeasures. It would appear that the most effective countermeasure is the passage of time, with the progressive acculturation to the digital products created by AI.
In closing, it is my pleasure and privilege to announce the names of the incoming members of the JMIS Editorial Board: Professors Ritu Agarwal, Cristina Alaimo, Yulin Fang, Gerald C. Kane, Elena Karahanna, Sabine Matook, and Liangfei Qiu. On their retirement from the Board, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks and best wishes for the future to Professors Janis Gogan and Mark Keil. It is the contribution of our outstanding Editorial Board, along with the extensive team of expert referees, that has made JMIS an FT50 journal.