We are happy to invite you to the ABRI Lunch Seminar 'AI agents and temporal patterns: how do they conduct temporal work?' by Dr. Omid Omidvar (Warwick Business School, UK) organized by ABRI and the KIN Center for Digital Innovation.
The seminar will take place on Tuesday, June 2nd, from 12:00 to 13:00 (HG-10A41). You can find more information below.
Abstract
Temporal work involves challenging the assumptions about past, present, and future, and changing and manipulating temporal patterns. It is predominantly explored through the work conducted by human actors, but in this paper, we examine how AI agents conduct temporal work. We theorize that AI agents conduct temporal work by reconfiguring temporal horizons and restructuring temporal patterns. We argue, first, that AI agents shift organizational engagement with the past from narrative to data-driven reconstruction, reshaping the future from unknowable to actionable representation. These changes create “temporal collapse”, our term for the compression of temporal distance whereby AI’s data-driven reconstructions of the past increasingly determine its actionable representations of the future. We then theorize that AI agents change temporal patterns by shifting timing from responsive to anticipatory, sequence from experientially grounded to algorithmically decoupled, and rhythm from entrained to adaptive. These changes result in three distinct modes of temporal patterning: Determining, Orchestrating, and Orienting. By explicating how AI agents conduct temporal work through temporal collapse, we contribute to organizational temporality research. We also contribute to AI and algorithmic management research by demonstrating the temporal nature of automation-augmentation dichotomy: automation emerges under complete temporal collapse, while augmentation emerges under minimal collapse.