Research2026-08-05

MIT Sloan Management Review published an article by Jennifer Sloan (formerly a research fellow at UCL School of Management) and Vern L. Glaser (University of Alberta's Alberta School of Business) arguing that professionals should configure and direct agentic AI systems rather than converse with LLMs through prompts. The authors propose three design levers for working with agents: context (what data the agent can access), capabilities (what it can do), and orientation (what it attends to), and suggest running multiple agents with different orientations over the same data set to compare problem-solving approaches. They call the resulting skill "directing intelligence." The framing draws on two studies: a qualitative study of AI-assisted discovery identifying four pathways to surprising insight (Strategic Organization, published online April 28, 2026) and "Organizations as Algorithms" (Journal of Management Studies, September 2024).

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