Abstract:

Inclusive AI capability ensures that AI systems benefit all members of society, rather than reinforcing existing disparities, biases, or inequalities. Without conscious inclusion, AI tools risk marginalizing underrepresented groups such as minorities, women, people with disabilities, and those in lower socioeconomic backgrounds by operating on datasets that fail to reflect the diversity of the human experience. Inclusive AI capability development focuses on the complexity of AI technology inclusion and on sustained integration within existing retail processes to serve diverse stakeholders equitably, improving trust, accessibility, and the customer experience. However, retail organizations in the UK lack a clear understanding of their organizational capabilities and mechanisms to embed inclusivity across the AI development and deployment lifecycle systematically. In this paper, we use a socio-technical, interdisciplinary, and participatory approach that embeds inclusivity and fairness throughout the entire AI lifecycle, rather than as a final audit check. The study argues that AI system integration and the business process cycle in retail firms are functions of strategic resource allocation and the management of inherent paradoxical tensions, such as accuracy vs. explainability. The study proposes a conceptual framework using a mixed-method approach across retail organizational AI design, development, and deployment stages. The framework elaborates how retail organizations build AI capabilities embedded with a human feedback loop, fairness, biases, explainability, and transparency (HTEB-P). In conclusion, the present study implications provide a strategic roadmap to the retail organizations in the UK, ensuring their AI capability development process and readiness represent the socioeconomic characteristics to exceed their performance. The findings further contribute to the organization's capability management literature and explain the inclusivity dilemma through the ongoing management of competing demands.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Organisational Transformation, Change and Development

Keywords: Change Management

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Dr. Joachim Timlon