The circular economy meets artificial intelligence (AI): understanding the opportunities of AI for reverse logistics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Technology is an important force in the entrepreneurial ecosystem as it has the potential to impact entrepreneurial opportunities and processes. This paper explores the emerging technology of artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for reverse logistics within the circular economy (CE). It considers key reverse logistics functions and outlines how AI is known to, or has the potential to, impact these functions. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual and utilizes the literature from entrepreneurship, the CE and reverse logistics to explore the implications of AI for reverse logistics functions. Findings AI provides significant benefits across all functions and tasks in the reverse logistics process; however, the various reverse logistics functions and tasks rely on different forms of AI (mechanical, analytical, intuitive). Research limitations/implications The paper highlights the importance of technology, and in particular AI, as a key force in the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem and discusses the specific implications of AI for entrepreneurial practice. For researchers, the paper outlines avenues for future research within the entrepreneurship and/or CE domains of the study. Originality/value This paper is the first to present a structured discussion of AI's implications for reverse logistics functions and tasks. It addresses a call for more research on AI and its opportunities for the CE and emphasizes the importance of emerging technologies, particularly AI, as an external force within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The paper also outlines avenues for future research on AI in reverse logistics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it