Responsible Management of AI Use in Organizations: Case Studies of Strategic AI Capabilities, Risk Controls, and Knowledge Management

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence (AI), yet many still struggle to translate its technical potential into reliable, and strategically aligned organizational outcomes. These challenges have intensified as AI evolves from static predictive analytics to dynamic and opaque systems embedded in core organizational processes. Existing responsible AI approaches mainly provide high-level ethical principles. As such, an important research question remains: How can organizations achieve responsible management of AI use?

To address this question, this thesis presents three qualitative case studies across different AI technologies and organizational contexts, contributing to explain how organizations can develop capabilities, governance mechanisms, and control approaches for responsible use. In particular, Study 1 examines how a social-media platform develops strategic AI capability when implementing predictive AI systems. The findings identify a cyclical capability development process that enables organizations to cultivate informed agility, controlled efficiency, and anticipatory resilience in response to evolving predictive AI outputs. Study 2 investigates dynamic learning recommendation systems across three leading social-media platforms and develops a cybernetic control approach for governing black-box AI systems through buffering, feedforward, and feedback controls. This study demonstrates how organizations maintain model performance and reliable control under conditions of continuous model evolution and learning instability. Study 3 examines a cybersecurity organization adopting generative AI for organizational knowledge management. Drawing on the SECI model of knowledge creation, this study proposes a phase-dependent AI alignment approach and identifies alignment mechanisms that support accountable, and domain aligned AI-generated knowledge outcomes.