Artificial Intelligence‐Mediated Eco‐Design and Environmental Strategy: Human Decision Authority, Sustainability Disclosure, and Lifecycle Accountability

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to generate, simulate, and optimize sustainable product designs. This development creates an environmental strategy problem that existing greenwashing, decoupling, and eco‐innovation theories do not fully explain: an environmentally favorable outcome may be technically real yet difficult for stakeholders to attribute to accountable organizational environmental judgment. This conceptual article develops eco‐algorithmic decoupling as a process attribution gap that may arise, especially for stakeholders who value traceable human environmental judgment, when meaningful human eco‐design decision authority is weak or when disclosures misrepresent the human‐AI division of decision‐making. It distinguishes this process attribution problem from lifecycle incompleteness, a separate accounting problem concerning whether material AI process impacts fall within product claim boundaries and are accounted for or disclosed. The article advances a two‐path credibility model: human decision authority affects perceived moral eco‐integrity and then claim credibility, while lifecycle completeness affects perceived claim completeness and then claim credibility. Disclosure congruence, stakeholder characteristics, and verified environmental performance moderate these paths. The paper contributes to environmental strategy by specifying how AI changes the governance conditions under which eco‐innovation is perceived as credible, accountable, and strategically valuable. It offers propositions, a governance typology, provisional PMEI items, coding rules, and an empirical research agenda for testing AI‐mediated eco‐design credibility.