Best Paper Award for ifm-researcher Robert Dehghan

The study builds on epidemic models of inter-firm technology diffusion and adds concepts of relational embeddedness from social network theory. We developed and applied a model of AI adoption to a broad web-based data sample of more than 380,000 firms in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. To this end, we train a transformer-based language model to identify firm-level AI adoption from over 1.1 million websites and replicate our econometric analysis for representative firm-level survey data from Switzerland. Our findings indicate a highly clustered pattern of diffusion and a rather closed system of AI adopters that is likely to hinder broader diffusion.