Persuasive agents for sustainable business practice: A theoretical study

Abstract

Presently practitioners in businesses are faced with issues related to the implementation of sustainable practices. Accordingly, practitioners in businesses need to make decision based on their current practice to verify if present practice considers the environmental, economic, and social elements of sustainability. But, at the moment businesses utilizes manual specification based ranking and benchmarking approaches to ascertain that practitioners consider the natural environment and society as they make profit. Nevertheless, there is need for an autonomous method of measuring firms sustainable practice implementation. Therefore, this paper develops a persuasive agent’s model to measure; benchmark and rate businesses current practice based on review of prior sustainability studies. The persuasive agents’ model comprises of sustainable practice operations question, alternatives, and persuasive agents measurement procedures. Respectfully, findings from the study depict how the integrated persuasive agents autonomously measure, benchmark, rate and provide recommendations to practitioners. This study provides implications on how businesses can improve their business operation towards social, economic and environmental sustainable practice implementation.