More than a tool: How organizationally embedded AI competence enables sustainable competitive advantages in media companies

Abstract

The media industry is under intense pressure to transform, while artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping value creation, value capture, and differentiation. Using a theoretical and conceptual approach, this article develops an integrative framework that explains how AI can contribute to competitive performance in media companies. The point of departure is the dynamic capabilities approach with the processes of sensing, seizing, and transforming. Based on a structured review of the literature, three central lines of argument are identified. First, AI unfolds its strategic value not primarily as an isolated technology, but through organizational capabilities that translate AI use into reliable routines and adaptation processes. Second, a distinction must be made between the intensity of AI use and the maturity of AI use. While high intensity can facilitate short-term operational effects, sustainable differentiation typically emerges only at a high level of maturity, meaning broad process integration, standardization, and scaling. Third, AI competence proves to be an organization-wide capability whose organizational embedding in governance, roles, quality routines, and learning routines functions as a central mechanism of impact. Empirical findings from different contexts support the assumption that AI-enabled improvements in sensing, seizing, and transforming are often asymmetrically developed and that transformative potential remains unused without appropriate embedding. The article concludes with implications for research and practice and derives an empirically testable expectation structure according to which competitive performance effects in media companies depend more strongly on the maturity of AI use than on its mere intensity.