Adoption of AI Integrated Partner Relationship Management (AI-PRM) in B2B sales Channels: Exploratory Study

Sheshadri Chatterjee, Ranjan Chaudhuri, Demetris Vrontis, Selma Kadic-Maglajlic*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

Partner relationship management (PRM) is a set of methods, tools, strategies, and web-based capabilities that a business-to-business (B2B) firm uses to manage its relationships with partners, resellers, and other third parties. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into PRM helps automate processes and procedures by eliminating human error and processing data faster and more accurately. Following growing attention from scholars and practitioners to AI-PRM, this study builds on the dynamic capability view (DCV) and absorptive capacity theory to develop a conceptual model to understand the requirements for a B2B firm's adoption of AI-PRM and its impact on business value. Since AI-PRM is still relatively new in scholarly research, there are no specific scales in the existing literature that could be used to capture specific factors and preconditions for its adoption, thus we explore a set of new metrics. We test the conceptual model using structural equation modeling with data from 427 B2B firms. Our results show that firms improve operational performance when an AI-PRM system is reflected in customized partner services and partner engagement, which in turn yields business value.
Original languageEnglish
JournalIndustrial Marketing Management
Volume109
Pages (from-to)164-173
Number of pages10
ISSN0019-8501
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2023

Keywords

  • Partner relationship management (PRM)
  • AI
  • AI-PRM
  • Operational performance
  • Business value
  • Customized partner services
  • Partner engagement

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