Strategic Leadership Supported by Artificial Intelligence and the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Identifying: Opportunities, Resource Coordination, Competitive Advantage, and Islamic Arts

Strategic decision-making is examined in relation to organizational innovation, sustainable competitive advantage, firm performance, and cultural-heritage development across five Arab countries, with support from artificial intelligence. An integrated quantitative design was employed by using firm level AI adoption and strategic capability data and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage data from Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the organisational stream, and country-level indicators and a hybrid text-structural machine-learning approach to analyse the heritage stream. The findings revealed that there was a significant relationship between leadership support and government support with AI adoption. AI adoption positively correlated with business model innovation, sustainable competitive advantage, and firm performance; the latter positively correlated with the former with the highest correlation coefficient. The heritage analysis revealed distinct panorama differences in terms of the size of a portfolio, the level of safeguarding, international collaboration, level of recent inscription activity and representation related to arts and crafts. The highest held out point estimates achieved using the proposed Hybrid Text-Structural XGBoost model were 0.9297 accuracy, 0.8272 balanced accuracy and 0.8396 Macro F1. But paired-bootstrap analysis did not provide statistically convincing superiority over the most powerful baseline. Overall, the study outlines a human-centred decision-support framework for safeguarding that incorporates the organisational capability and heritage analytics to be employed for prioritising safeguarding, planning collaboration and making decisions for cultural development based on evidence, while maintaining expert oversight and cultural authenticity.