The effect of AI-based CRM on organization performance and competitive advantage: An empirical analysis in the B2B context

Organizations have cultural-cognitive and regulative as well as normative elements that impact their employees. Organizations, by definition, cannot achieve a pure, stable state and always go through various change processes, both incremental and radical changes. Moving from legacy business-to-business (B2B) relationship management to an artificial intelligence-based customer relationship management (AI-CRM) is a gradual but paradigm change. AI-CRM leverages intelligent systems to automate the B2B relationship activities where the decision can be taken automatically without any human intervention. Relationship management in the B2B segment is considered a strategic activity of an organization. Moving from legacy to AI-CRM to facilitate B2B relationship management activities is an important decision, and proper implementation of AI-CRM is a critical success parameter for an organization. This study combines institutional theory and the resource-based view (RBV) in B2B relationship management to understand how AI-CRM could impact the firm's performance with varied firm size, firm age, and industry type.