Material and Linguistic Practices in the Shaping of AI-Based Collective Agency

Abstract

This article explains how material practices and naming shape collective agency in organizations that depend on artificial intelligence. It addresses an apparent tension. An AI system can be a constitutive condition of what an organization can do at a given time. The same system can remain replaceable across the organization’s history. This distinction separates present agency from persistence through change. This article develops affordance facts as an analytically distinct category within explanations of social facts. These facts concern the possibilities for action that a material or computational arrangement makes available to situated users. They differ from anchoring facts because they do not establish the rules that ground a social fact. Naming has a related but narrower role; it supports recognition and coordinates claims of continuity, yet it is neither necessary nor sufficient for organizational identity. A revised thought experiment on structural relocation shows that continuity cannot be determined by an AI system alone. Brief illustrations involving IBM Watson Health and Google DeepMind support this claim. The resulting view avoids technological determinism because it treats agency as relational. AI systems can shape organizational capacities without becoming autonomous identity bearers. They are often constitutive conditions of present activity and contingent operational infrastructures across time. This framework clarifies how responsibility can remain with an organization even when an AI system has become indispensable to its current operations.