From the ‘Inter-AI Period’ to the ‘Agentic Era:’ The Role of Management Mathematics

Abstract

The ‘Inter-AI Period’ described a narrow window in which society, organizations, and scholars could shape the norms and decision processes embedded in artificial intelligence (AI). That window has not disappeared but has narrowed. AI is no longer merely a tool that responds to human prompts; it is becoming an agentic layer within organizations—capable of initiating, coordinating, recommending, and executing decisions. This marks a shift from human-AI interaction to human-AI-organizational co-evolution. The central challenge for management mathematics is therefore no longer limited to improving models or optimizing decisions. It is to design, govern, and evaluate decision architectures in which human judgement and machine agency are dynamically configured over time. The earlier paper on the ‘Inter-AI Period’ was a call to shape AI before practices hardened. This follow-up, based on interviews with business leaders and scholars, is a call to shape the decision architectures through which AI will act.