Agentic Artificial Intelligence as a New Frontier in Information Systems: Promise, Peril, and Research Opportunities
Summary¶
A research note characterising agentic AI as autonomous systems "capable of planning, reasoning, and acting with minimal human oversight" that are reshaping enterprise information systems. Early deployments are credited with measurable efficiency gains (e.g., 30% cost reductions in customer service, improved decision accuracy in finance, streamlined administrative workflows in healthcare) but also expose tensions around labor displacement, transparency, governance, and equity, which the authors frame as structural consequences viewed through a socio-technical systems lens.
Contribution¶
Three explicit contributions: (1) clarifying the architectural and operational foundations of agentic AI and surveying application domains; (2) situating adoption risks within socio-technical perspectives; and (3) introducing an "agentic AI tradeoff framework" that names six strategic tensions with associated research questions for the IS community.
Method¶
Conceptual research note; surveys current enterprise deployments and risks and derives a framework of six strategic tradeoffs from a socio-technical systems perspective.
Relevance to RISE¶
Proposes an 'Agentic AI Tradeoff Framework' with six strategic tradeoffs (efficiency vs. labor equity, innovation vs. adoption barriers, automation vs. explainability, etc.). Useful taxonomy for evaluating end-to-end RISE pipelines along non-technical dimensions.
Critique / open questions¶
Industrial deployment numbers are sourced from vendor press releases (Microsoft, Google Cloud, Salesforce), not independent measurement; the tradeoff framework is conceptual rather than empirically validated; the paper takes the existence of "agentic" systems as a clean category despite the term's commercial elasticity.
Key quotes¶
"Agentic artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and acting with minimal human oversight, is reshaping enterprise information systems."
"This research note … (3) introducing the 'agentic AI tradeoff framework,' which outlines six strategic tensions and associated research questions."