When AI Becomes an Agent of the Firm (Humberd & Latham, 2025) | FT50 JMS

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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit! 🤩

Picture your company's AI. 🤖 It’s a tool. It follows commands. It optimizes. It serves. Simple.

But what if it learns? What if it grows? What if it starts making its own decisions, pursuing its own goals, operating with an autonomy you never intended? Suddenly, that tool is an agent. An employee. One that doesn't need a paycheck or a promotion. It just needs... what? This is the electrifying premise of a new paper published on August 14, 2025, by Beth K. Humberd and Scott F. Latham in the Journal of Management Studies. They argue that as AI evolves, it starts to look a lot like a human manager, creating classic conflicts of interest and information gaps. The problem is, you can't offer a stock option to a line of code. Or can you? The authors dive deep, rethinking how we manage our creations before they start managing us.

This research isn't just from any journal; it's from a highly prestigious FT50-listed journal, representing the pinnacle of management research. 🏆 It forces us to confront a future that is arriving faster than we think.

Which leads to a fascinating, and slightly chilling, question: If we design new ways to monitor and incentivize our AI agents, are we truly aligning them with our company's fate, or are we just teaching them how to be better at hiding their own agenda? 🤔

A massive thank you to the authors, Beth K. Humberd and Scott F. Latham, and to the publisher, the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., for this incredible work! 🌟

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Reference

Humberd, B.K. and Latham, S.F. (2025), When AI Becomes an Agent of the Firm: Examining the Evolution of AI in Organizations Through an Agency Theory Lens. J. Manage. Stud.. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13274

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