From Instrument to Economic Actor: Generative and Agentic AI as a New Logic of Business Model Innovation

(1) Background: Generative and, increasingly, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping how firms create, deliver, and capture value. Yet business model innovation (BMI) research often assumes that humans retain design authority while digital technologies support analysis or execute predefined decisions. This assumption becomes contestable when AI systems can generate value-bearing artifacts, participate in organizational decision-making, and undertake goal-directed action within delegated boundaries. (2) Approach: Integrating business-model and activity-system research, dynamic capabilities, socio-technical and human–AI decision-making perspectives, and research on generative and agentic AI, this concept paper develops a framework that distinguishes three logics of AI-enabled BMI: a supporting logic (AI as instrument), a generative logic (AI as co-creator), and an agentic logic (AI as delegated economic actor). The framework distinguishes business-model operation from business-model innovation and identifies delegated reconfiguration authority as a key condition under which agentic action can constitute BMI. (3) Contribution: The paper advances six propositions explaining how AI redistributes ideation, decision, execution, and reconfiguration rights; how machine agency may compress the interval between business-model reconfigurations; how value-capture mechanisms may change; and why complementary capabilities, governance, and legitimacy remain decisive. (4) Conclusions: The paper offers a focused research agenda centered on agency allocation and decision rights, the temporal dynamics and measurement of BMI, and value capture and governance in agent-mediated business models. It thereby provides a more precise theoretical basis for distinguishing autonomous operation within a business model from autonomous or semi-autonomous reconfiguration of the business model itself.