Special Issues

December 2027 MISQE Special Issue on
Designing, Managing, and Scaling the Delegation of Work to AI Agents

Academic Workshop & Call for Papers

Location: ICIS 2026 pre-conference Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2026
Time: 12:30 pm to 5:30 pm

Overview

Organizations are moving rapidly from AI tools that assist humans to AI agents that act on their behalf. In this emerging model, AI agents act as active participants in organizational work, capable of planning, deciding, and executing tasks to achieve specific goals. (We use the term agentic AI to refer to AI solutions that pursue goals by taking multi-step action across organizational systems with limited or asynchronous human supervision. The Special Issue welcomes work on both single-agent and multi-agent deployments (including agents that interact with employees, customers, partners, suppliers, citizens, or other stakeholders), provided the analytical focus is on how humans delegate work to AI agents and manage the consequences of that delegation.) As organizations delegate more work to these systems, they must rethink how they govern and manage them alongside new models of human–AI collaboration. The challenge is as much managerial as it is technical, involving how work is organized and decisions are made.

While this shift is already underway, there exists a considerable gap between ambition and execution. Organizations are adopting agentic AI faster than they are learning to manage it, causing many agentic AI initiatives to stall at the pilot or proof-of-concept stage. This Special Issue of MIS Quarterly Executive therefore invites practice-oriented and evidence-based insights on how organizations are delegating work to agentic AI systems, how they manage that delegation, and what they are learning along the way. We seek frameworks and actionable guidance that help senior managers design human-agent work more effectively. We welcome contributions from both academic researchers and practitioners, and are particularly interested in submissions grounded in real organizational experience, including failure cases.

Topics

Submissions may address one or more of the following themes:

Designing Delegation: how organizations allocate decision rights between humans and AI agents; how they determine which tasks and decisions to delegate; and how that allocation evolves as agent functionality and organizational confidence in AI agents change.
Preparing Data and Knowledge for Delegation: how organizations structure data, codify human expertise, document processes, and provide sufficient organizational context so that AI agents can act effectively and appropriately.
Developing Human Capabilities: what skills and training humans need to supervise agents, evaluate outputs, manage exceptions, and collaborate with agents effectively; how organizations guard against the atrophy of expertise as agents absorb routine work; and how they continue building skills once agents take over tasks and decisions that constituted traditional development pathways.
Overseeing Agents in Action: how organizations design and operate guardrails, monitoring, audit, compliance, trust, and intervention mechanisms when agents act with limited supervision; how they determine when human review is needed before, during, or after agent action; and how they manage agent identity, permissions, system access, and attribution of agent actions.
Reorganizing Work and Leadership: how structures, roles, routines, and management practices change when agents handle execution or coordination; what roles and leadership practices emerge for directing and supervising agentic work; and how organizational culture enables or resists delegation to AI agents.
Scaling from Pilot to Production: why agentic initiatives stall before reaching production; what distinguishes organizations that scale successfully; and how organizations measure the value, cost, risk, and performance of agentic AI over time.

Note that papers should engage directly with the delegation of work, decisions, or actions to AI agents as defined above. We discourage purely technical papers without a managerial dimension, as well as studies in which substituting “GenAI”, “machine learning”, or “automation” for “agentic AI” would not change the paper’s substance.

Paper Development Workshop

To support authors, a paper development workshop will be conducted at ICIS 2026:

Workshop date: December 12, 2026 (ICIS 2026, Lisbon Portugal)
Abstract submission: Submit an extended abstract of no more than two single-spaced pages of text and up to two figures (figures and references do not count against the page limit) to MISQEAgenticAI@gmail.com by September 1, 2026.
Notification of workshop acceptance with preliminary editorial feedback: October 15, 2026.
Attendance: If invited, at least one author must attend the MISQE author development workshop in person to present the research and receive feedback from the guest editors. Workshop participation is not a prerequisite for submission to the Special Issue, and an invitation to the workshop does not constitute acceptance for publication.

Special Issue Submission Guidance &Timeline

Submissions should provide clear, accessible insights for executive and practitioner audiences. These insights should demonstrate strong practical relevance for organizational decision-making (see Editorial guidance here). Contributions are expected to offer evidence-based perspectives grounded in empirical research and industry practice. Therefore, we welcome high quality submissions which provide, for example:

Clear managerial implications and actionable recommendations
Frameworks, models, or tools that support executive decision-making
Rich examples grounded in case studies, action research, field observations, or executive interviews
Practical lessons on implementing and managing agentic AI in organizations

Deadlines

Special Issue full paper submission deadline: March 1, 2027
Full paper submission link: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/misqe
First editorial review sent to authors: May 1, 2027
Paper resubmission based on editor feedback deadline: July 1, 2027
Second editorial review, decision, and suggestions to authors: August 1, 2027
Final submission of accepted papers deadline: October 1, 2027
Publication of Special Issue: December 2027

All papers must be original and not have been previously published or under consideration for publication in any other journal. Manuscripts should follow standard guidelines for MIS Quarterly Executive and be submitted via the journal’s submission system. Please indicate that your submission is for the Special Issue on “Agentic AI.”

Workshop Organization & Special Issue Editors

Nick van der Meulen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, nmeulen@mit.edu
Noel Carroll, University of Galway, Ireland, noel.carroll@universityofgalway.ie
Hind Benbya, Western Sydney University, Australia, H.Benbya@westernsydney.edu.au
Hope Koch, Baylor University, Hope_Koch@baylor.edu