AI systems offer organizations great benefits causing decision-makers to invest more in these systems. The advantages of AI cannot be achieved without successful implementation. Thus, it is crucial to recognize the factors impacting the successful implementation of AI. It is also important to assess and rank these factors by their importance to assist decision-makers in implementing these systems and increasing the success rate. Due to its importance, scholars called for studies to expand our knowledge in this critical area. This paper identifies, extracts, and assesses the most critical factors that influence the implementation of AI systems. This study identifies nineteen factors and categorizes them into four categories: organization, technology, process, and environment. The analytical hierarchy process is used to evaluate the factors and the categories. The analysis offers two types of results, at the category level and the level of the factors. The results indicate that technology is the most significant of the four categories. The results also suggest that ethics is the most crucial factor among all nineteen factors. The order of all factors and discussions of the implications of the findings for practice and research are presented in the paper. •We identified nineteen factors and categorized them into four categories.•We used the analytical hierarchy process to evaluate the identified factors.•We found that technology, as a category, is the most important.•We also found that ethics is the most crucial factor of all nineteen factors.•We offer nineteen research propositions for future research on AI implementation.