Whether digital village construction can effectively promote agriculture’s green development is essential for modernizing agriculture and rural areas. Using panel data from 30 provinces in China between 2011 and 2022, this study empirically examines the relationship between digital village construction and agroecological efficiency and explores its mechanism of action and threshold effect, contributing to the exploration of agricultural digitization and sustainable development. This study shows that (1) AEE is positively associated with digital village construction; (2) the positive association size varies in regions and construction levels; (3) agricultural land transfer and technological innovation play a mediating role in the positive effect; and (4) there is a single threshold value for the positive effect of digital village construction, and after crossing the threshold value, its marginal effect shows a positive and increasing nonlinear characteristic. This study enhances our comprehension of digital village development to advance agroecological efficiency and offers theoretical insights and policy recommendations for optimizing the rural digital infrastructure and fostering sustainable agricultural growth.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how tourists search for information and plan their trips, yet the psychological mechanisms underlying sustainability-oriented travel intentions remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on perceived value theory and trust theory, this study develops a dual-path framework linking tourists’ current engagement with GenAI for tourism purposes to their stated sustainable tourism decision intentions through perceived value and trust in AI. An anonymous online survey administered via Wenjuanxing recruited participants in China and yielded 956 complete questionnaires, of which 830 were retained after predefined quality screening. The four constructs—current GenAI engagement, functional perceived value, trust in AI, and stated sustainable decision intention—were operationalized using 14 theoretically aligned indicators. Standardized composite-score path analysis with 5000 bootstrap resamples revealed positive associations along both indirect pathways. The indirect association through trust (β = 0.113) was stronger than that through perceived value (β = 0.064), with a statistically significant bootstrap contrast (difference = 0.048, 95% CI [0.009, 0.088]). Given the cross-sectional and self-reported nature of the data, the findings are interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects or evidence of observed behavior. The study demonstrates that perceived functional benefits and confidence in AI-generated information are theoretically distinct yet jointly relevant to tourists’ sustainability-oriented travel decision-making.