Digital, AI-enabled marketing and the competitiveness of trade services: a sociological perspective on labor transformation, social inclusion and organizational capacity

Research on digital and AI-enabled marketing explains how channels, data, and algorithms create value for firms, while the sociology of digital labor explains how the same technologies reorganize work and access. Neither explains why trade-service firms adopting near-identical tools reach very different competitive outcomes, a question that matters most for small firms in emerging and transition economies. This conceptual Perspective proposes a model of socially mediated competitiveness in which the adoption of digital and AI-enabled marketing, treated as one continuum from basic digital channels to generative-AI content, customer response, and targeting, affects competitiveness through three mechanisms. Labor transformation reallocates marketing tasks between automation and human judgment, strengthening competitiveness where workers can direct AI tools and weakening it where work depends on platform and algorithmic control. Social inclusion, through access, skills, and autonomy of use, decides how many firms and which social groups can contest a digitally mediated market. Organizational capacity, through routines for sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring human-machine practices, decides whether adoption becomes durable advantage. The theoretical novelty is threefold: the model joins mechanisms usually studied apart, treats job quality and inclusion as conditions of competitiveness rather than only its consequences, and adapts concepts built for large firms to small, platform-dependent trade-service firms. It is stated as three propositions with proposed indicators and a multi-wave design for testing them. The article reports no data and claims no empirical validation. It closes with theoretical, sociological, managerial, policy, and research implications.