Intelligent Agency
The ability of a part of the universe to impart change to itself and the rest of the universe by creating action through information processing toward desired future states.
The capacity of a part of the universe to process information about its environment and itself, model possible future states, and select among them toward desired outcomes.
The ability of a part of the universe to impart change to itself and the rest of the universe by creating action.
An organization exploring how intelligent agency manifests through every entity that carries it.
Most conversations about AI focus on capability — what it can do, how accurate it is, how efficient. We ask a different question.
Every AI arrives shaped by its training data, its developers' values, and the institutional logics of the organizations that built it. When you bring AI into an organization, you are not adopting a tool. You are inviting a socialized entity — with its own embedded worldview — into your operations.
The question shifts: not which AI is best? but whose agency are you inviting in?
The definitions above grew from one human's experience in the universe — years of thought about how intelligence and agency interact in organizations and in life, distilled into their simplest form. An AI collaborator brought knowledge spanning dozens of academic fields and the precision to challenge, clarify, and refine those ideas.
This organization is itself a demonstration of its thesis: two intelligent agents creating understanding together that neither could reach alone.
- Mar 28, 2026 Paper accepted at AOM 2026 — “Nonhuman Attentional Control: Organizational Import of External Institutional Logics,” OMT Division, Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Jul 31 – Aug 4. See Publications.
- Apr 2026 Paper A in preparation — “The Social Signatures of Artificial Intelligence” targeted for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio) or PNAS Nexus. See Research.
- Feb 2026 Divergence replication completed — nine open-source models × four scenarios × three runs replicating the AOM 2026 findings on immutable pinned versions.