Guest editorial: Artificial intelligence, remote work, digital transformation, human resource management practices: rethinking organisational effectiveness

IntroductionWhen we launched the call for papers for this Special Issue in June 2025, the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of work was already moving faster than most organisations, policymakers, or researchers could track.Generative AI technologies, having entered public consciousness with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, were by 2025 reshaping task boundaries across knowledge-intensive industries, transforming recruitment, performance management and learning and development functions, and accelerating a wider reconfiguration of what organisations expected from their employees and their HR functions (Budhwar et al., 2023;Chowdhury et al., 2024;Malik et al., 2023).One year later, as we write this editorial in June 2026, the pace has not slowed.If anything, it has accelerated.What seemed like a rapidly approaching future in 2025 is now the operational reality for millions of workers and the organisations that employ them.This context lends the papers assembled in this Special Issue an urgency that goes beyond the academic.The questions they address, how AI reshapes HRM practices, how employees build resilience in AI-mediated environments, how organisations develop the capabilities to commercialise technology without losing sight of people, how remote and hybrid work interact with career sustainability and generational expectations, are not abstract scholarly puzzles.They are the defining organisational challenges of this moment.And yet, as our call for papers noted, they have tended to be studied in disciplinary silos: AI researchers examine automation and algorithmic decision-making (Budhwar et al., 2023;Malik et al., 2023); HRM scholars study people practices and performance (Boxall and Purcell, 2022); remote work researchers focus on flexibility and wellbeing (Doargajudhur et al., 2026;Zapata et al., 2024).However, integrated research that examines how these forces act together to reshape organisational effectiveness remains limited (David et al., 2024;Jarrahi, 2018).That integration is what this Special Issue sets out to provide.The response from the international research community exceeded our expectations.The volume and quality of submissions we received reflect the depth of scholarly appetite for exactly this kind of synthesis.Given the number of high-quality papers accepted, this Special Issue will be published in two parts.The present editorial introduces Part 1, which brings together fourteen contributions spanning bibliometric analysis, qualitative inquiry, structural equation modelling, mathematical modelling, mixed-method designs and predictive machine learning.These papers speak from twelve national contexts across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and engage with workers and organisations across industries as varied as financial services, hospitality, IT, construction, banking, retail, public services and higher education.It is, we believe, one of the most internationally diverse and methodologically rich collections yet assembled on these themes in a single journal issue.Collectively, the papers in this Special Issue show that organisational effectiveness in the AI era depends less on technology adoption alone and more on the alignment between human capability, HR governance, leadership practice, employee wellbeing and digital work design.The contribution of the Special Issue is therefore not simply to examine AI, remote work, digital transformation and HRM as separate developments, but to show how these forces Journal of Organizational Effectiveness:People and Performance 957