Digital transformation and artificial intelligence are increasingly being recognized as strategic enablers of sustainable organizational performance, yet the mechanisms linking them to sustainability outcomes remain fragmented, particularly regarding the microfoundations of organizational intelligence. This study reviews how digital transformation and artificial intelligence contribute to sustainable performance through organizational intelligence from a microfoundational perspective. A systematic literature review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews 2020 guidelines, using Scopus and Web of Science and covering peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2026. Sixty studies were selected and analyzed through narrative and thematic synthesis. The findings suggest that digital transformation provides digital infrastructure, connectivity, and data integration, while AI supports prediction, automation, analytics, and decision-making. However, neither is consistently linked to sustainable performance in isolation. Their contribution appears to depend on individual skills, organizational capabilities, and process-level routines. The review also shows that economic, environmental, and social performance follow different pathways and require different configurations. Persistent gaps include conceptual fragmentation, proxy constructs for organizational intelligence, limited multilevel integration, and weak empirical modeling of internal mechanisms. Overall, digital transformation and artificial intelligence are more plausibly linked to sustainability when embedded in capability-driven configurations that transform information into coordinated organizational action.
Espina-Romero et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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