Economics, Business and Management: Recent Advances Vol. 4

Digital transformation is changing agribusiness through connected data, analytics, automation, platforms and digitally enabled relationships across production, processing, distribution and retail. Yet much of the literature equates technology adoption with transformation and infers business value from technical capability rather than demonstrating how value is created, delivered, captured and distributed. This critical narrative review examines digital transformation as a strategic and organisational process in agri-food enterprises, with particular attention to business-model innovation, enterprise performance, platform and data governance, resilience, sustainability and inclusion. Literature published from 1 January 2010 to 10 July 2026 was identified through multidisciplinary and agriculture-, management- and economics-oriented scholarly sources, supplemented by citation searching and bibliographic verification. Seminal earlier business-model research was retained where conceptually necessary. The synthesis indicates that the strongest evidence concerns digitally enabled process optimisation, information and coordination efficiencies, market access, traceability and selected supply-chain outcomes. Evidence that digitalisation consistently produces superior long-run financial, environmental or resilience outcomes is less mature and is concentrated in case studies, cross-sectional research and listed-firm panels from a limited set of countries. Digital technologies are therefore best understood as enabling infrastructures rather than business models in themselves. Business-model transformation occurs when firms redesign interdependent activities, revenue and contracting logics, customer interfaces, service propositions, ecosystem roles or rules governing data and complementors. Platforms and data-intensive models can expand coordination and service scope, but may also redistribute value towards technology intermediaries and generate dependence, opacity and lock-in. A framework is developed that links digital foundations, analytical capability, work redesign, business-model architecture, ecosystem governance and outcome distribution. The review concludes that the future competitiveness of agri-food enterprises will depend less on the possession of individual technologies than on their ability to combine digital assets with organisational capabilities, interoperable institutions and credible arrangements for data rights, value sharing and accountability.