AI and Business Anthropology: Introduction to the Themed Essays

Abstract

When we put out the call for this themed issue, we placed a single question at its center: Does contemporary AI represent a fundamental shift for business anthropology – or not? More specifically, we asked whether AI marks a genuine break from the digital turn already underway in the field, or whether it is better understood as a cumulative extension of it. This introduction traces what nine essays found: a field mid-conversation, not mid-consensus. The essays, largely from a United States vantage point, approach the question from genuinely different positions – as interpreters, critics, builders, designers, and practitioners whose working lives are already shaped by AI in ways they cannot set aside. Rather than advancing a single argument, the collection offers a conversation in which contributors disagree about the nature of the shift AI represents, about whether the discipline’s primary obligation is interpretive or productive, and about the mood with which practitioners are navigating a moment of genuine uncertainty. With these questions unresolved, the introduction closes by asking: what if? If those who believe that AI is already reshaping the conditions of anthropological work prove correct, the implications may extend beyond methodology to something more fundamental: a transformation in what it means to know anthropologically and, ultimately, in what it means to be an anthropologist.