Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to support activities such as language improvement, literature organization, idea development, coding assistance, preliminary data exploration, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, managerial interpretation, theoretical reasoning, scholarly judgment, business analysis, methodological evaluation, or original contribution.

Authors are responsible for:

• verifying factual accuracy and checking references generated by AI;
• reviewing and substantially editing AI-assisted content;
• checking for bias, hallucination, fabricated citations, misleading business claims, or unsupported managerial recommendations;
• protecting confidential, personal, corporate, proprietary, copyrighted, and unpublished data;
• ensuring that AI-assisted outputs do not replace expert interpretation of organizational, managerial, financial, marketing, entrepreneurial, strategic, or operational data;
• independently verifying AI-assisted coding, classification, modeling, forecasting, or analytical outputs; and
• ensuring that the final manuscript represents the authors' own scholarly work.

Meaningful use of generative AI in manuscript preparation must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool used, its purpose, and the extent of human review and oversight.

Basic spelling, grammar, or punctuation checks do not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, business analytics, predictive modeling, market analysis, organizational analysis, text analysis, sentiment analysis, decision modeling, forecasting, or other data-analysis procedure, its use must be described in sufficient detail in the Methods section.

AI tools, chatbots, and language models must not be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, accountability for its content, and the ability to respond to questions regarding the research, methodology, data, analysis, interpretation, and conclusions.

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in research images, figures, charts, dashboards, screenshots, organizational documents, business records, or other visual research materials in a manner that misrepresents the original data or evidence.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted visualization, synthetic-data generation, image analysis, automated classification, or other AI-based processing is part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, procedure, validation process, training or reference data where relevant, and its role in generating or interpreting research data in the Methods section.

Submitted manuscripts are confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, supporting files, organizational records, confidential company data, interview transcripts, proprietary business information, unpublished datasets, or review reports into public generative AI systems.

Peer review is a human scholarly responsibility. AI tools must not be used to generate scientific assessments, independently evaluate theoretical or methodological quality, assess managerial implications, or determine review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content, reasoning, fairness, and integrity of their reports.

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, proprietary organizational information, unpublished business data, corporate records, or editorial decision letters into public generative AI systems.

AI must not replace human editorial judgment or be used to determine acceptance, revision, or rejection. Editors remain fully responsible for editorial evaluation, ethical assessment, reviewer selection, communication, confidentiality protection, and final publication decisions.