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Agri-food supply chains are increasingly exposed to overlapping disruptions arising from climate variability, geopolitical instability, pandemic effects, price volatility, labour shortages, and changing consumer demand. These pressures have intensified interest in resilience-oriented technologies that can help supply chains anticipate disruption, absorb shocks, adapt operations, and recover service continuity. Artificial intelligence has emerged as a prominent candidate because it can transform fragmented supply chain data into forecasts, alerts, recommendations, and operational decisions. This systematic review examines how artificial intelligence is being applied to strengthen agri-food supply chain resilience. The review focuses on four functional domains: forecasting, traceability, risk detection, and decision support. It asks whether current AI applications merely improve isolated technical tasks or whether they provide demonstrable evidence of resilience improvement across agri-food supply systems. The review follows a systematic design informed by PRISMA reporting principles and structured literature review procedures. A corpus of 32 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2025 was synthesised. The selected studies cover AI forecasting models, blockchain-enabled traceability, quality and safety monitoring, logistics optimisation, supply chain decision support, and review-methodology guidance. The synthesis shows that forecasting research is technically advanced, especially in price prediction, demand forecasting, and quality-sensitive perishable supply chain management. Traceability and risk detection studies show strong growth around blockchain, IoT, big data, computer vision, and food safety monitoring. Decision support research connects AI to resilience more directly, but most evidence remains conceptual, model-based, or function-specific rather than validated through real disruption events. The review concludes that AI has substantial potential to support agri-food supply chain resilience, but the evidence base remains fragmented. Existing studies tend to focus on single functions such as forecasting accuracy, provenance visibility, or routing efficiency, while system-level resilience outcomes are rarely measured. Future research should therefore move from isolated AI applications toward integrated, empirically validated, resilience-focused agri-food intelligence systems.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being embedded in agri-food supply chains through applications such as automated quality grading, risk scoring, demand forecasting, logistics optimisation, pricing analytics, and food safety alerts. These systems promise efficiency, resilience, and improved decision support, but they also reshape how decisions are made and who is affected by them. In food systems, AI governance is not only a technical issue but also a matter of safety, fairness, market access, and public trust. Existing responsible AI principles provide important normative foundations, including fairness, transparency, accountability, human oversight, and social benefit. However, these principles are often framed at a general level and do not fully address the distinctive structure of agri-food supply chains. Food chains are fragmented across farms, processors, logistics providers, retailers, technology platforms, regulators, and consumers, which makes governance more complex than in single-organisation AI deployment. This article develops a domain-specific Responsible AI Governance Framework for agri-food supply chains. The framework integrates four pillars: transparency, accountability, traceability, and human oversight. It argues that responsible AI in food must make algorithmic decisions visible, assign responsibility across distributed actors, preserve auditable records, and ensure meaningful human safeguards for high-risk decisions. The proposed framework specifies transparency requirements for different AI applications, maps accountability responsibilities across supply chain actors, connects traceability systems to auditability, and defines human oversight mechanisms for safety-critical and livelihood-sensitive decisions. Three tables operationalise the framework through transparency requirements, accountability allocation, and integrated governance mechanisms. The article concludes that responsible AI in food requires governance that is as distributed, interconnected, and safety-conscious as the supply chains it seeks to guide.

Digital food systems promise to connect farms, processors, logistics providers, retailers, regulators, and consumers through continuous data exchange. In this vision, production conditions, quality records, traceability events, safety alerts, inventory signals, and sustainability indicators move across the food chain as shared informational infrastructure. Yet the operational reality remains far less integrated, with food data often fragmented across systems that cannot easily communicate. The central problem is that existing debates frequently treat interoperability as a technical matter of software connection, data standards, or platform implementation. Such accounts understate the systemic, organizational, and political conditions that make data exchange difficult even when digital technologies are available. The result is a persistent gap between the promise of farm-to-fork data continuity and the practical experience of disconnection. This article develops a theory of data frictions in digital food systems. Data frictions are conceptualised as points of resistance, incompatibility, and disconnection that interrupt data flow between heterogeneous food system actors. The objective is to explain why interoperability fails across farms, processors, retailers, and regulators despite growing investment in digital agriculture, traceability systems, blockchain platforms, and data governance frameworks. The article adopts a conceptual theory-building approach based on a synthesis of 26 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2025. It draws on information systems, food supply chain management, agricultural data governance, platform studies, and organizational theory. The synthesis does not present new empirical data but uses existing evidence to construct a theoretical explanation of interoperability failure. The theory identifies four interrelated categories of data friction: technical, semantic, organizational, and political. These frictions manifest differently across the farm-processor-retailer-regulator nexus but jointly undermine coordination, traceability, accountability, and digital transformation. The article argues that data frictions are not peripheral glitches but structural features of digital food systems, requiring governance innovation, shared standards, and incentive alignment across the chain.