Modular Legal Personhood for AI Use Cases: An Enterprise Systems Engineering Framework for Digital Transformation

AI-enabled digital transformation can create governance gaps when model-level controls do not capture deployment-specific organizational relationships and enterprise-wide policies remain too general for materially different use cases. This article addresses that problem through a design-theoretic synthesis of Enterprise Systems Engineering, socio-technical governance, modularity theory, accountability scholarship, and organizational law, treating the AI use case as an intermediate enterprise-system boundary. It develops modular legal personhood as one possible legal-organizational architecture for structuring human and enterprise responsibility around that boundary; the concept does not attribute legal personality or autonomous responsibility to AI. The framework specifies connected governance functions, staged implementation, and assessment mechanisms linking boundary, configuration, authority, resources, evidence, corrective action, lifecycle adaptation, and enterprise-level coordination. The analysis indicates that legal differentiation is neither necessary nor sufficient for effective governance: its potential value arises when existing mechanisms leave these functions fragmented, while alternative legal, contractual, or internal arrangements may be preferable when they provide equivalent capabilities with lower burden. The framework remains a design-theoretic and empirically testable proposition; the hypothetical application is illustrative rather than validating, and practical feasibility, reliability, and comparative effectiveness require future organizational pilots and comparative research.