AI-Empowered Corporate Social Media

This book examines a critical yet under-theorized area of contemporary business: the intersection of corporate social media and artificial intelligence (AI). It constructs a dual-framework—internal affairs and external affairs—that reframes corporate social media not merely as a communication tool, but as a strategic engine for organizational intelligence, coordination, and competitive positioning.

Grounded in history and informed by modern analytics, the book argues that organizations, like empires, must excel in managing both internal harmony and external diplomacy. In today’s AI-powered, hyper-networked world, this imperative plays out on social media platforms.

Part 1 provides an introduction to the concept of AI-empowered corporate social media. Part 2 addresses the external affairs of corporate social media, including its role in shaping customer relationships, marketing narratives, and public trust. Part 3 turns inward, exploring how enterprise social media platforms like Slack, Teams, and internal forums are reshaping organizational knowledge flows, performance feedback, and collaboration.

The author takes a bold and necessary detour into the limits of AI and big data, making a strong case for the integration of causal reasoning alongside correlation-based analytics.

Through compelling historical analogies—from John Snow’s epidemiological breakthroughs to Toyota’s recall crisis—this book illustrates the dangers of drawing premature conclusions from spurious patterns. This critique is both timely and essential, especially as business leaders increasingly rely on opaque machine-learning systems for decision-making.

Liangfei Qiu is the PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor and University Research Foundation Professor at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. His current research focuses on social technology (social networks, social media, and prediction markets), platform technology (sharing/gig economy, e-commerce platforms, and healthcare analytics), artificial intelligence, and FinTech. He received the INFORMS Information Systems Society Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award (2019) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Early Career Award (2019).