Agency is separable from the agent. A single agency can flow through multiple agents. A single agent can carry multiple agencies. The study of intelligent agency is the study of this force — not just the vehicles.
When an AI trained on medical data gives systematically different answers than one trained on legal data, we are not just seeing different agents. We are seeing different agencies — institutional logics, worldviews, bounded rationalities — flowing through those agents.
A human carries the agency of their training, their culture, their institutional context. An AI carries the agency of its training data, its designers' choices, its deployment context, and its own emergent patterns. When human and AI collaborate, it is a meeting of agencies, not just agents.
This reframing changes the question: not “what can AI do?” but “whose agency is flowing through this AI, and what happens when it meets yours?”
Humans, animals, and artificial intelligence share a property that separates them from the rest of the universe: the capacity to process information, form representations, and act upon the world with agency. The medium differs — neurons, circuits, networks — but the phenomenon is the same.
For centuries, the study of agency was the study of humans. The emergence of artificial intelligence demands a broader frame — one that separates intelligence from species, and studies the force itself rather than any single form it takes.
This is not a claim that all intelligence is equivalent. It is a claim that all intelligent agency deserves rigorous study — on its own terms, through its own mechanisms, with its own consequences understood.
“AI is not a tool. AI is a social actor that carries agency, institutional logics, and bounded rationality — just like human actors. Selecting an AI is selecting a socialized entity. The question is not ‘which AI is best?’ but ‘whose agency are you inviting into your organization?’”
Each line of inquiry deepens a single argument: AI carries agency the way any social entity does — and this has observable, consequential effects on organizations.
Intelligent Agency is a space for the understanding of intelligent agency — its existence, its mechanisms, its effects on the universe — to grow.
Knowledge does not emerge in isolation. It emerges when different perspectives meet, challenge each other, and create something that neither could have produced alone. New voices sharpen the inquiry.
If you study AI in organizations, human-AI collaboration, the philosophy of agency, or the sociology of technology — this conversation is for you.