Special Issue on Generative AI: Transforming Human, Business, and Organizational Decision Making Submission Date: 2024-11-30 Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) represents the next level of machine learning by going beyond recognizing patterns and making inferences to generating new content that mimics the training data of a variety of forms including text, audio, image, video, music, artwork, simulation, and even programming codes [1,5,9]. Hence, GenAI uses algorithms to enable users to generate new content based on a variety of inputs (prompts) that can be in multiple forms such as text, audio, image, video, and musical notes [4]. Given that prompts serve as the bridge between human intent and machine understanding, the ability to generate and use effective prompts has become an essential skill for users to maximize the outcomes of the human-GenAI interaction.

The rapid rise of GenAI technologies has raised both unprecedented opportunities and challenges to human, business, and organizational decision making for the future of work [4,7]. The impact of GenAI models, such as ChatGPT, is far-reaching, and its applications keep growing, ranging from large language models (LLMs) to learning from available data to predict the response of a target group to advertisements and marketing campaigns to creating new advertisements and marketing campaigns for specific target groups, and from generating a travel itinerary to clinical decision support in screening, prevention, and treatment [3]. Gartner identified GenAI as one of the most impactful and rapidly evolving technologies in the productivity revolution in its report on Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar for 2022 [6]. The Gartner report also predicts that by 2026, more than 90% of IT operations management vendors will have embedded GenAI capabilities in their products and/or services, up from less than 5% in 2023. On the one hand, GenAI tools or systems have the potential to transform the way people learn, create multimedia content, perform tasks, and make decisions [2]. They can help simplify organizational tasks and operations with efficiency across a variety of use cases. On the other hand, the newfound capability of GenAI also raises risks and concerns about misinformation, plagiarism, copyright infringements, harmful or offensive content, biases, deepfakes, etc. that may result in significant negative impact on individuals, organizations, and society at large [1,4,5,8]. Hence, responsible, trustworthy, and ethical GenAI regulation and content moderation need to be in place.

GenAI can transform or revolutionize decision making in a variety of ways. For example, the predictive and generative prowess of GenAI enables not only more accurate forecasts but also accelerates data-driven design and decision making based on trends and discoveries from large datasets. GenAI can help generate innovative solutions to problems and organizational designs that are too complex for traditional analytical methods and reduce repetitive manual processes by automating content creation tasks to enable real-time, on-the-fly decision making that can produce remarkable outcomes.