AI-Enabled Information System Capability in HealthTech Startups

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded within organisational information systems (IS), particularly in healthcare, where it supports diagnostics, predictive analytics, and personalised care. Despite technological advances, AI adoption among HealthTech organisations, their conversation in AI and IS literature on HealthTech firms are also relatively low. This limited adoption suggests capability-related rather than purely technical or regulatory constraints. Traditional IS capability frameworks assume stable technological artefacts and therefore insufficiently account for AI’s learning, probabilistic, and opaque characteristics. This study identifies four interrelated capability gaps in HealthTech SMEs: the need for continuous process reconfiguration, sustained upskilling and organisational unlearning, human–AI orchestration, and embedded ethical-by-design governance. Drawing on Dynamic Capability Theory, the research conceptualises AI adoption as a capability reconfiguration challenge shaped by entrepreneurial cognition and judgement. Using an interpretive methodology and purposive interviews with UK HealthTech founders, the study try to understand how Healthtech firms are navigating the challenges that they encounter while building their AI-enabled IS capability. This study will also contribute theoretically to dynamic capabilities and empirically to responsible AI adoption in resource-constrained environments.