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1. Introduction
The diffusion of digital technologies (big data, artificial intelligence, the internet of Things, cloud computing and so on), far from being merely an IT evolution, greatly impacts firm activities, business models, decision-making processes, boundaries, cultures and value chains.
On the one hand, the new landscape strengthens companies' understanding of markets and input, which is improved day by day thanks to data. On the other, it increases the complexity of the external environment, which becomes faster-changing every moment. This increased ability to read and interpret data has an impact on the external environment which, inevitably, becomes more complex. Indeed, as stated by the economics of complexity, firms are complex systems organized to cope with the excess of complexity of the external environment, which – in the attempt to reduce external complexity – increase their own and contribute to making the external environment generally more complex for other organizations. Large corporations and new start-ups must constantly adapt their business models as rapidly as possible to react to this change that big data and artificial intelligence are imposing upon the market. Predictive models can support companies in this revolutionary change and help them redesign their decision-making and strategy definition processes. Predictive models support the transition from big data to informative and valuable cognitive assets in a new Knowledge 4.0 system, where knowledge management is extended to social knowledge environments and decision-makers play a completely different role. Information will be presented to managers in a new way that will redefine the importance of their mental representations and more generally redesign their role in the process of strategy making.
Thus, digitalisation implies the development of new models to support decision-making based on cognitive computing. These systems ingest data not only from previous decision-making activities and business histories but also from different structured and unstructured sources; by using deep learning techniques, they can provide experts with indications of the best direction to take next. Predictive models provide a map of if-then, questions-answers indications in which decisions can be based on the chances of possible related outcomes. This way they guide decision-making, activating (enacting) specific views of the surrounding environment (Weick, 1969).
Thus, this paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, we will observe the phenomenon of digital transformation...