Business transformation in the age of generative AI: from strategy to societal impact

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming the foundations of business innovation, operations, and strategy.Moving beyond traditional AI's focus on prediction, GenAI enables the autonomous creation of novel content, designs, and processes across diverse business domains.This paper synthesises the state of research on GenAI's transformative impact, covering strategic innovation, operational excellence, customer engagement, and organisational development.It explores key technical architectures, transformers, GANs, VAEs, diffusion, and multimodal systems, and examines emerging challenges related to ethics, fairness, privacy, and regulation.Drawing from recent literature and practical deployments, the study identifies critical gaps and proposes a future research agenda at the intersection of AI and business.The analysis highlights GenAI's dual role as a catalyst for business model innovation and a driver of systemic change in organisational learning and decision-making.The paper invites scholars and practitioners to engage in shaping this rapidly evolving field with responsibility and foresight.