Role of Artificial Intelligence Capability in the Interrelation Between Manufacturing Strategies and Operational Resilience

Recent global disruptive events, like COVID-19, energy transition, war, and recession, affect the firm's operations. Manufacturing firms recently focused on resilience and moved toward adopting new technologies. This study identifies the role of artificial intelligence capability (AIC) between manufacturing strategies, namely production strategy (PRS), product development strategy (PDS), and service quality strategy (SQS), and firms’ competitive advantage in terms of operational resilience. A resource-based view has been utilized to develop AIC in manufacturing firms for operational resilience, and the hypotheses were examined using the structural equation modeling. Two hundred thirteen respondents participated in the survey, including five constructs and twenty-nine items. The findings reveal that product development strategy is linked beneficially to production, service quality, and AIC. The production strategy is also linked to the SQS. The findings also confirm that AIC mediates between PDS, PRS, and SQS and operational resilience. The study is significant for practitioners in understanding the role of AIC in modernizing manufacturing and production strategies for firms’ competitive advantage as firms become more operationally resilient. This study is unique because it empirically analyzes the role of manufacturing strategies in building AIC for improving operational resilience as a competitive advantage for a firm.