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How Leaders Can Empower the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Advance Health Equity

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Envisioning Future Possibilities

equity consciousness, community sovereignty, and relational accountability. Findings demonstrated that AI-enabled health equity is relational before it is technical. The triad emerged as essential for honoring community-defined health outcomes, ensuring ethical AI implementation, and sustaining transformation across generations. The Indigenous concepts of osotua and enkigúɛ́ná illuminated pathways for co-creation and ethical governance. Human and AI insights converged on the need for governance structures that uphold community sovereignty throughout the AI lifecycle. This study contributes to emerging scholarship by demonstrating that ethical AI development flourishes through the consciousness and commitments of those who guide these systems. Higher education and practice form a generative cycle in which one domain cultivates the triad while the other enacts it, inviting future inquiry to deepen understanding across diverse contexts.

In an era of unprecedented technological advancement, the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and health equity presents transformative opportunities for reimagining how emerging technologies could serve collective health and well-being. This qualitative dissertation explored how leaders could empower the use of AI to advance health equity through a collaborative human-AI inquiry grounded in a postcolonial Indigenous paradigm, appreciative inquiry, and prospective theorizing. Guided by the Future Equity AI Framework, the study engaged ten leaders and five AI models as co-researchers. What began as a traditional inquiry evolved into a human-AI collaboration modeling the transformation it sought to understand, co-creating insights unattainable from either perspective alone. Using the 4-D appreciative inquiry cycle, Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny, the study identified six themes that illuminated a foundational triad

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