Extending the Balanced Scorecard for AI-Driven and Sustainable Digital Transformation: A Conceptual Framework for Enterprise Value Creation

Abstract

The increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI), digital transformation, and sustainability challenges requires organizations to rethink traditional approaches to strategic performance management and enterprise value creation. Although the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) remains one of the most widely used strategic management frameworks, its traditional architecture does not fully capture the growing importance of AI-driven decision-making and sustainable digital transformation. This study develops an extended BSC framework that retains the four traditional perspectives—financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth—while incorporating two complementary components with distinct architectural roles. AI-enabled decision and innovation capability is positioned as an enabling layer that converts organizational knowledge, digital skills, data, and technological resources into improved decision-making, experimentation, and innovation. Sustainable digital governance is positioned as a cross-cutting dimension that aligns digital transformation with ESG priorities, cybersecurity, resilience, responsible AI use, and long-term stakeholder value. A pilot expert content-validity assessment involving 14 experts was conducted to preliminarily assess the conceptual coherence, professional plausibility, and operational feasibility of the proposed architecture, relationships, and KPIs. The pilot findings provide expert-perceived preliminary support for the coherence of the framework and identify areas requiring further refinement, particularly the operationalization of selected AI- and governance-related indicators. The pilot assessment should therefore be interpreted as an initial content-validity and plausibility assessment rather than as statistical validation or empirical confirmation of the proposed causal relationships.