AI Adoption and use in rural small and medium enterprises: An examination of network effects

The proposed research speaks to two areas of the LSBS call for proposals ‘Geographical disparities between firms in capabilities, attitudes, or performance’ and ‘Which businesses are adopting digital, AI etc, what are the drivers and are there peer effects’. The research aims to uncover more around the use of AI in regional, and more specifically rural SMEs. The research draws upon recent AI SME research (e.g. Baabdullah et al., 2021; Sharma et al., 2024) and marketing B2B network literature (e.g. Chen et al., 2021; Keegan et al., 2022; Mariani & Okumus, 2022), contextualised within the regional/rural setting. We aim to further develop models of AI adoption and usage, specifically in SMEs (Bowen & Morris, 2019, 2023; Issa et al., 2022) and then enhance insight of the persistence of AI usage in SMEs.