THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ADOPTING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN BUSINESS: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

Business organizations continually strive to enhance their decision-making capabilities and integrate innovations through technological advancements. Among these, Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents significant ethical considerations that require thorough examination. The main objective of this review is to identify and categorize the ethical issues that business organizations may face as they design and adopt AI in their processes. Additionally, it analyzes trends in the ethical challenges associated with AI to understand how these issues have evolved over time. A systematic approach was applied to relevant databases to gather and analyze appropriate scholarly articles. The rapidly changing nature of AI has limited the availability of relevant articles and excluded several publications. Among the articles retrieved through the search strategy, those published between 2008 and 2024 were used for the review. Ethical frameworks and case studies were applied to build a comprehensive analysis of the ethical landscape. The findings reveal key ethical issues such as the long-term impact of AI, privacy concerns, job displacement, cybersecurity, and data protection. This review provides insights into the ethical landscape of adopting emerging technologies in business and offers a conceptual analysis of practical issues to inform ethical decision-making and future policy development. By examining how these ethical implications have developed over time, this review highlights significant gaps in existing research. These insights lay the groundwork for future research to address the existing gaps and develop standardized practices. This review emphasizes the need for up-to-date practical ethical governance to address the complex ethical challenges created by emerging technologies in today’s business environment. Furthermore, it underscores the responsibility for policy and governance related to the adoption of emerging technologies in the business context. The findings also highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement and transparency, workforce implications and skill development, long-term sustainability, and ethical innovation practices in the modern business context.