This study aims to develop a conceptual framework designed to assist organizations in understanding and promoting the adoption of a multidimensional Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) enterprise risk management (ERM) that integrates artificial intelligence (AI). The proposed framework serves as a tool to improve organizational risk governance, stability, and resilience within an evolving digital landscape characterized by increasingly complex, rapidly changing, and interdependent risks.
This study creates a conceptual framework by expanding upon the conventional technology-organization-environment (TOE) model through theoretical integration and tailored ERM contextualization. The methodology includes an extensive review and synthesis of literature on COSO ERM, multidimensional risk perspectives, AI-driven risk management, and technology adoption frameworks.
This paper conceptually extends the TOE framework by maintaining its core dimensions while introducing two novel ERM-specific constructs: security and privacy (SnP) and organizational multidimensional risk–technology awareness (ORTA). It also reconceptualizes three existing TOE constructs to better align with COSO ERM realities: organizational compatibility is embedded within organizational readiness (ORD), top management support is operationalized as tone at the top (TtT), and cost is reframed as value for money (VfM). These additions and refinements enhance the explanatory power of the original TOE framework by demonstrating how both traditional and ERM-specific factors shape organizational perceptions of readiness, trust, and strategic alignment in a digital risk environment.
The proposed framework improves our theoretical understanding of ERM transformation in the digital era by providing a more integrated explanation of how adoption decisions are shaped within complex governance environments. Unlike previous fragmented explanations of technology uptake, this framework demonstrates how interconnected determinants simultaneously influence ERM transformation, especially in AI-enabled settings.
From a managerial perspective, the framework offers a structured approach for evaluating adoption readiness and designing interventions that facilitate successful COSO ERM transformation. It allows risk leaders to systematically assess internal preparedness across key governance and capability dimensions, with a particular focus on the awareness of multidimensional risk, leadership commitment, and organizational trust in AI-enabled risk systems.
This study has broader societal implications by promoting stronger organizational resilience and more effective risk governance in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Adopting a multidimensional COSO ERM integrating AI can enhance an organization's ability to anticipate and respond to emerging risks, including financial, operational, cyber, and ESG-related challenges.
This study addresses an important gap in the literature by investigating the organizational adoption of a multidimensional COSO ERM integrating AI. The interplay between ERM-specific determinants, technological enablers, and managerial adoption intentions in this context remains largely unexplored. By expanding the TOE framework with novel and refined ERM-focused constructs (e.g. ORTA, ORD, VfM, TtT, and SnP), the proposed conceptual model offers a theoretically robust and practically applicable tool for understanding how organizations address strategic, cultural, and governance challenges in digitalized risk management.
