From tools to constitutive forces: Intelligent technologies in strategy and organization

Abstract

Intelligent technologies, that is, AI-based, computational systems that can generate, adapt, and act on outputs through forms of inference that extend beyond pre-specified rules, are increasingly implicated in how organizations learn, what they know, and how they are structured. Yet, strategy and organization scholarship has largely continued to treat technology as contextual rather than constitutive, leaving core assumptions about knowledge, social interaction, and organizational form insufficiently examined. In the call for papers, we asked researchers to remedy this by putting technology front and center in rethinking the field’s foundational building blocks. The ten contributions to this special issue take up that call and illuminate three critical ways through which intelligent technologies are reconfiguring organizations. First, intelligent technologies reshape organizational learning by moving firms from managing knowledge scarcity to navigating knowledge abundance. Second, they alter the production and validation of organizational knowledge by introducing new forms of machine-generated inference and epistemic stances that challenge established knowing practices. Third, they transform organizing itself by reshaping coordination, interaction patterns, and the structures through which collective activity is accomplished. A closing editorial synthesizes key insights and develops a research agenda for advancing strategy and organization scholarship in this new landscape.