AI-Enabled Business Models for Sustainability

Abstract

The chapter investigates the transforming convergence of AI and sustainability, placing AI as core infrastructure facilitating a change from linear, extractive corporate models to regenerative entrepreneurial ones. These models turn planetary constraints into sources of innovation, profitability, and long-term competitive advantage in the face of resource shortages, biodiversity loss, and climate emergency by actively restore natural and social capital. Core contributions include seven archetypes: Product-as-a-Service, resource recovery, waste prevention, circular marketplaces, decentralized energy systems, regenerative agriculture/carbon removal, and longevity models; a typology of AI-native, AI-augmented, and AI-enabled sustainable models; and the new Triple-Layered AI-Enabled Business Model Canvas.It includes financing innovations, value creation, scaling by means of AI flywheels and platforms, and risks with mitigations. It ends by profiling the Regenerative Entrepreneur and proposing a research agenda for fair, net-positive AI-sustainability Integration in the 2030s.