Ethics in the age of artificial intelligence: unveiling challenges and opportunities in business culture

This paper aims to examine the role of organizational culture, mainly ethics, in the field of artificial intelligence. In particular, it investigates the contribution of ethics in implementing artificial models developed for financial decision making in organizations. The research methodology is based on developing an artificial model using a ready dataset from a developed country, Poland, which includes financial ratios of bankrupt and non-bankrupt companies, and then testing this model on a self-developed dataset of bankrupt companies in a developing country, Lebanon. However, the research suffers one limitation related to gathering accounting and financial data necessary to build new datasets in Lebanon which in turn should open up future lines of research. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal was to conclude if the same model would be reliable in both cultures due to its dependence on objective measures and criteria (i.e. financial ratios) or if specific factors (e.g. organizational culture/ethics) might act as barriers facing the optimal utilization of AI algorithms and models in Lebanese organizations. The empirical findings revealed that the absence of ethical organizational conduct, high level of corruption, and poor official governance are major examples of the obstacles confronting the rewarding application of AI in Lebanon.