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Emma Wiles

Questrom School of Business - Boston University

IT Exploration and IT Exploitation Across Contexts: A Meta-Analysis of IT Ambidexterity and Research Agenda

Date: Friday, May 15, 2026
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
³¢´Ç³¦²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô:ÌýRoom 310 – Bronfman basement

Abstract

Motivated by the potential for large productivity gains from AI, firms are increasingly deploying agentic AI systems capable of independent action. Some firms have also begun formally integrating these agents into their organizational structures—assigning them designated roles and responsibilities, and in some cases explicitly referring to them as employees. This creates new challenges for decisions like when to delegate and how to monitor work. In a survey of 1,261 managers, we find that 23% of managers already work in organizations where AI agents have been formally institutionalized on organizational charts. In a randomized experiment we provide those managers with identical documents containing built-in errors, where we vary whether the drafts are presented as produced by an AI tool, an AI employee, or a human employee. Average effects to error catching are small. However, in the subgroup of managers whose organizations already have ‘AI employees’, presenting identical drafts as produced by an AI employee (versus an AI tool) reduces managers’ monitoring intensity by 16%, increases their reliance on additional review from others, and shifts their perceived accountability away from themselves and toward the AI system. The human employee condition shows that this is not simply a response to delegation, in fact, managers do the most careful oversight when they’re told the work comes from their human employee. These results suggest that embedding AI agents into formal organizational roles can reduce managerial oversight in AI-mediated work and should be understood as a governance decision rather than a mere labeling choice.