Artificial intelligence and digital product passports: Data governance infrastructures enabling circular business model innovation

Digital Product Passports have emerged as a central regulatory instrument within the European Union's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, aiming to enhance transparency, traceability, and circularity across product value chains. While prior research has examined digital traceability systems, artificial intelligence, and circular business models in isolation, integrative frameworks explaining how these elements jointly enable systemic circular transitions remain underdeveloped. This article addresses this gap by developing an integrative conceptual framework informed by a PRISMA-guided systematic review and bibliometric mapping, which positions Digital Product Passports (DPPs) as data-governance infrastructures whose circular potential is realised through the interaction between AI-enabled analytics and dynamic capabilities at both organisational and ecosystem levels. The analysis shows how structured DPP data can support AI-driven sensing, seizing, and transforming processes, thereby reducing information asymmetries and enabling circular business model innovation. It further demonstrates that the effectiveness of AI–DPP integration is contingent upon robust data governance arrangements, interoperability standards, and coordinated multi-actor participation, while also revealing tensions related to data sovereignty, unequal access to digital infrastructures, and the environmental footprint of digital technologies. By linking regulatory design, technological capabilities, and business model transformation, this article advances theory on digitally enabled circularity and provides policy and managerial insights for fostering scalable and inclusive circular transitions.