Abstract
Indigenous peoples’ worldviews permeate the businesses they run, providing them with a unique competitive advantage to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for success. Indigenous worldviews encompass understandings of complex, dynamic relationships. Such understandings position Indigenous businesses to better optimize economic sovereignty, well-being, and prosperity than mainstream businesses. AI-mediated marketing systems shape how businesses are recognized, ranked, and integrated into digital market streams. Indigenous worldviews understand the world as a complex constellation of relationships encompassing human and more-than-human kin that form an indivisible, perpetually fluxing relational ecosystem. As such, Indigenous worldviews provide Indigenous businesses with innate “relational fluency” with sophisticated understandings for engaging with AI as non-human kin within marketing systems. Anchored in the sister concepts of Indigenous survivance (an ongoing, self-determined Indigenous presence) and thrivance (flourishing grounded in Indigenous lifeways), this chapter presents the Indigenous Business Algorithmic Futures (IBAF) conceptual framework and a “blakprint” guiding its operationalization. The IBAF describes how Indigenous relational fluency interacts with algorithmic infrastructures through three intertwined dimensions. First, algorithmic recognition captures how AI systems detect and interpret Indigenous business identities; second, algorithmic mediation highlights how AI systems govern provenance and credibility signals; and third, algorithmic sovereignty concerns the governance frameworks for Indigenous custodianship of Indigenous data, cultural and intellectual property. Overall, Indigenous businesses are uniquely advantaged by their relational fluency, which positions them for success in marketing ecosystems increasingly characterized by non-human intelligence.