How Purpose-Specific AI Use Builds Organizational Resilience: A Dynamic Capability Perspective

Abstract: Organizational resilience has become essential as enterprises navigate volatility, disruption, and rapid technological change. While artificial intelligence is widely viewed as a resilience enabler, most research treats AI adoption as uniform technological input rather than examining how distinct purposes of AI use shape resilience-building mechanisms. This article synthesizes emerging scholarship on AI-enabled dynamic capabilities to clarify how work-oriented and social-oriented AI applications differentially contribute to organizational resilience. Drawing on dynamic capability theory and configurational analysis, we explore how AI use strengthens sensing, operationalization, and reconstruction capabilities, and how data-driven culture moderates these relationships. The analysis reveals that both forms of AI use enhance resilience through capability development, with work-oriented AI showing stronger direct effects. Moreover, resilience emerges through multiple configurational pathways rather than singular linear mechanisms. These findings offer practitioners evidence-based guidance for purposefully deploying AI to build adaptive capacity, and highlight the importance of aligning AI strategy with organizational culture and capability development objectives.

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