Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually becoming an integral part of the digital strategy of organizations. Yet, the use of AI in public organizations in still lagging significantly compared to private organizations. Prior literature looking into aspects that facilitate adoption and use of AI has concentrated on challenges concerning technical aspects of AI technologies, providing little insight regarding the organizational deployment of AI, particularly in public organizations. Building on this gap, this study seeks to examine what aspects enable public organizations to develop AI capabilities. To answer this question, we built an integrated and extended model from the Technology-Organization-Environment framework (TOE) and asked high-level technology managers from municipalities in Europe about factors that influence their development of AI capabilities. We collected data from 91 municipalities from three European countries (i.e., Germany, Norway, and Finland) and analyzed responses by means of structural equation modeling. Our findings indicate that five factors – i.e. perceived financial costs, organizational innovativeness, perceived governmental pressure, government incentives, regulatory support – have an impact on the development of AI capabilities. We also find that perceived citizen pressure and perceived value of AI solutions are not important determinants of AI capability formation. Our findings bear the potential to stimulate a more reflected adoption of AI supporting managers in public organizations to develop AI capabilities.

人工智能 (AI) 正逐渐成为组织数字化战略不可或缺的一部分。然而，与私人组织相比，公共组织中人工智能的使用仍然明显滞后。先前研究促进人工智能采用和使用方面的文献集中在人工智能技术的技术方面的挑战，对人工智能的组织部署提供很少的见解，特别是在公共组织中。基于这一差距，本研究旨在研究哪些方面使公共组织能够发展人工智能能力。要回答这个问题，我们从技术-组织-环境框架 (TOE) 构建了一个集成和扩展的模型，并向欧洲城市的高级技术经理询问了影响其 AI 能力发展的因素。我们收集了来自三个欧洲国家（即德国、挪威和芬兰）的 91 个城市的数据，并通过结构方程模型分析了响应。我们的研究结果表明，五个因素——即感知的财务成本、组织创新、感知的政府压力、政府激励、监管支持——对人工智能能力的发展有影响。我们还发现，感知到的公民压力和人工智能解决方案的感知价值并不是人工智能能力形成的重要决定因素。