Editorial: Sustainability in practice and data-driven intelligence

Prior research published in ABAC Journal reflects the expanding ways in which sustainability is being addressed across business and tourism contexts, encompassing industry coordination, organizational transformation and the mechanisms underlying sustainable participation and behavior. At the industry level, sustainability in the global MICE and business events sector has been framed as a collective coordination challenge, with progress requiring sustainability efforts across industry stakeholders to be consolidated and scaled, alongside attention to actionable sources of carbon emissions within the industry supply chain (Koh, 2026). At the organizational level, digital transformation has been linked to ESG performance, although its effects vary across different dimensions of transformation, with green innovation providing an important mechanism through which digital transformation contributes to ESG outcomes (Ren, Boonlua, & Jirawuttinunt, 2025). At the individual and behavioral level, ABAC Journal's sustainability research has focused on tourism and event contexts, examining how sustainable participation and behavior arise from combinations of structural, contextual and psychological mechanisms. In green sport events, structural incentives influence outcomes through perceived fairness and authenticity, while alignment between structural and symbolic attributes strengthens engagement and satisfaction, with these effects contingent on community resource capacity (Manosuthi & Senachai, 2026). Alongside these configurational influences, evidence across different sustainable tourism contexts highlights the role of normative processes and the growing use of necessity-based explanations of sustainable behavior. In urban tourism, low-carbon attributes were found to differ in their roles as influential and necessary conditions for sustainable tourist behavior, with Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) identifying low-carbon activities, sustainable dining and waste management as necessary despite their relatively limited influence in the sufficiency-based model (Worrachananun, 2025). In UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy, central and peripheral persuasion cues activate moral norms that drive sustainable behavior, while NCA further identifies moral norms as a necessary condition for sustainable behavior adoption (Fakfare, Sertsri, Hemapanpairo, & Worrachananun, 2026). In a green-heritage destination, subjective norms strongly shape sustainable visitation intentions, while configurational and necessity analyses reveal distinct norm-driven and heritage-value pathways and the conditions underlying sustainable tourism outcomes (Manosuthi, 2025).

Extending these established perspectives, the three studies in this issue further develop sustainability research across infrastructure, corporate governance and individual behavior. Viriyasitavat et al. (2026) extend sustainability governance to the infrastructure level by showing how sustainability can be embedded, monitored and verified within digital infrastructure rather than assessed only after implementation. Through design-compliance, sustainability objectives are integrated into infrastructure operations and linked with measurable evidence, making sustainability an integral part of how digital systems are designed and governed. Treepongkaruna and Suttipun (2026) extend the organizational perspective toward corporate governance by demonstrating that the environmental relevance of board structure varies across its characteristics. Greater female representation is associated with lower carbon emissions and larger board size with higher emissions, while board independence, tenure and CEO duality show no significant effects, focusing attention on board gender diversity and size in relation to corporate carbon outcomes. At the individual level, Pinthong (2026) develops a cognitive-affective-normative explanation of eco-friendly coastal participation, showing that green destination attributes differentially influence tourists' awareness of environmental consequences and environmental empathy. Awareness of consequences strengthens ascribed responsibility, which in turn shapes personal norms and ultimately eco-friendly participation, while environmental empathy plays a more limited role in this normative process. Building on the use of NCA in recent sustainability studies published in ABAC Journal (Fakfare et al., 2026; Manosuthi, 2025; Worrachananun, 2025), the study further distinguishes between factors that contribute to sustainable behavior and those that are necessary for achieving high levels of participation, identifying ascribed responsibility and personal norms as necessary conditions.

Recent research in ABAC Journal demonstrates how data and intelligent technologies are reshaping decision-making, organizational performance and human responses across business and societal contexts. In the hotel industry, big data analytics capability strengthens financial performance both directly and through improved supply chain agility and performance, illustrating how the value of data depends on an organization's capacity to translate analytical insights into operational capabilities (Meathawiroon, Songkhwan, & Thunyachairat, 2025). In financial services, combining machine learning with alternative data enables more precise credit-risk classification and supports lending decisions for customers whose credit potential may not be adequately captured by conventional credit information (Achalapong & Satitsamitpong, 2025). Data-driven intelligence also supports decisions beyond conventional business settings. Analysis of road accident data identifies key factors associated with accident severity and translates these insights into social marketing strategies for road safety (Noonpakdee, Satitsamitpong, Senachai, & Napontun, 2025), while the integration of historical, fundamental, technical and sentiment information improves foreign-exchange prediction compared with reliance on historical data alone (Wanna & Porntrakoon, 2025). Alongside these applications, the human capacity to engage with AI is also becoming consequential. The alignment of AI literacy and AI self-efficacy strengthens digital entrepreneurial identity and self-efficacy, which subsequently contribute to digital entrepreneurial hustle, indicating that the implications of intelligent technologies extend beyond analytical performance to how individuals understand their capabilities and act within AI-enabled environments (Duong, 2026).

Extending this direction, Pongwat, Sugunnasil, Law, Duang-In, and Teerasoponpong (2026) demonstrate how large-scale customer-generated data can be transformed into actionable intelligence for restaurant management. Drawing on 300,784 online reviews across six major Asian culinary destinations, the study applies zero-shot classification and text analytics-based importance-performance analysis (TAIPA) to examine restaurant service quality and customer satisfaction across different price segments. Food quality emerges as a consistent foundation of customer satisfaction, while the role of service quality varies across customer evaluations, becoming particularly critical among dissatisfied customers. Price and value also emerge as key areas requiring managerial attention in Midrange and Fine Dining restaurants. By transforming large-scale, unstructured customer feedback into differentiated priorities across restaurant segments, the study illustrates how data-driven and intelligent analytics can support more targeted managerial decision-making.

To situate the articles in this issue within these research directions, Table 1 synthesizes established knowledge and the developments represented across the two themes.