Ethical challenges in using Artificial intelligence in knowledge management; Considering in tourism industry

Information technology (IT) is tied to any plans to enhance knowledge management (KM) in organisations. This tight connection is rooted form a revolution in deep learning that has improved the capacity for algorithms to simulate human capabilities in managing knowledge, from “seeing” (image recognition) and “hearing” (voice recognition, natural language processing), to more complicated abilities such as “deciding”. Therefore, these capabilities, which are connected with human social behaviour, as in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, have increasingly found their way into knowledge management procedures. Moreover, knowledge and learning are the cross points in AI and KM, so recent advances in AI have provided new foundations for transforming KM in organisations, and an organised KM system has increased AI capabilities. However, despite the pros of AI roles in KM, ethical challenges have been at the core of concern among academic scholars and digital experts. On the other hand, the current literature has also discussed just some lines and fragmented problems, which led to a big gap. This research seeks to identify the key indicators of AI ethical challenges in the KM in the tourism industry. We follow rigorous research using a combined exploratory and confirmatory approach to identify determinant factors and indicators of ethical challenges in applying AI in KM and measure the importance of each element. Therefore, first, we applied the Delphi method to explore and forecast the main items and factors. Then, we analysed the conformity of first-step outputs by Confirmatory Factor Analysis for the next step. Experts who participated in the first round are 18 professionals and academic professors in Tourism and AI in Iran. For the second study, we applied surveys from 210 employees with different levels of responsibilities in the Tourism industry. Our results concluded six critical factors and 24 indicators of ethical challenges associated with AI in KM: procedure values, responsibility, privacy, autonomy, security, and justice.