From Predictive Analytics to Agentic Decision Intelligence: A Governance-Aware Framework for Human–AI Management Systems
Abstract
Organizations are moving beyond dashboards and predictive models toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that can interpret goals, plan multi-step work, invoke digital tools, and initiate actions. Yet management research still lacks a coherent model for deciding when such autonomy creates value and when it creates unacceptable organizational risk. This conceptual article develops the construct of Agentic Decision Intelligence (ADI) to describe governance-bounded AI-enabled decision systems that combine analytical inference, Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, organizational knowledge retrieval, tool use, and monitored action. Drawing on research in business analytics, human–AI collaboration, algorithmic management, explainability, trust, autonomous agents, and AI governance, the paper develops a five-layer architecture linking organizational sensing, evidence construction, decision reasoning, controlled execution, and learning. It then introduces a decision-rights model that assigns human and machine authority according to consequence severity, environmental uncertainty, reversibility, and evidentiary strength. Four governance mechanisms, provenance, permissioning, escalation, and continuous assurance, are integrated into the architecture so that autonomy becomes conditional rather than binary. The resulting framework explains why agentic systems should not be evaluated only by predictive accuracy or task completion: managerial value depends on the joint quality of decisions, actions, accountability, and organizational learning. The article contributes a vocabulary for distinguishing analytical, generative, and agentic capabilities; a governance-aware architecture for management analytics; six testable propositions; and a staged implementation roadmap. These contributions reposition management analytics from insight production toward accountable decision execution and provide a research agenda for designing human–AI systems that are both operationally useful and institutionally governable.
Keywords:
Agentic artificial intelligence, Management analytics, Decision intelligence, Human–AI collaboration, AI governance, Organizational decision-makingReferences
- [1] Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2007). Competing on analytics: The new science of winning. Harvard Business School Press. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781422103326&i=stripbooks&linkCode=qs
- [2] Provost, F., & Fawcett, T. (2013). Data science for business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking. O’Reilly Media. https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Business-Data-Analytic-Thinking/dp/1449361323
- [3] Gupta, M., & George, J. F. (2016). Toward the development of a big data analytics capability. Information & management, 53(8), 1049–1064. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.07.004
- [4] Wamba, S. F., Gunasekaran, A., Akter, S., Ren, S. J. f., Dubey, R., & Childe, S. J. (2017). Big data analytics and firm performance: Effects of dynamic capabilities. Journal of business research, 70, 356–365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.08.009
- [5] Mikalef, P., Krogstie, J., Pappas, I. O., & Pavlou, P. (2020). Exploring the relationship between big data analytics capability and competitive performance: The mediating roles of dynamic and operational capabilities. Information & management, 57(2), 103169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2019.05.004
- [6] Davenport, T. H., & Ronanki, R. (2018). Artificial intelligence for the real world. Harvard Business Review, 96(1), 108–116. https://academichelptoday.com/assets/documents/Artificial_Intelligence_for_the_Real_World_-_HBR.pdf
- [7] Jarrahi, M. H. (2018). Artificial intelligence and the future of work: Human–AI symbiosis in organizational decision making. Business Horizons, 61(4), 577–586. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2018.03.007
- [8] Shrestha, Y. R., Ben-Menahem, S. M., & von Krogh, G. (2019). Organizational decision-making structures in the age of artificial intelligence. California management review, 61(4), 66–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125619862257
- [9] Raisch, S., & Krakowski, S. (2021). Artificial intelligence and management: The automation–augmentation paradox. Academy of management review, 46(1), 192–210. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2018.0072
- [10] Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing artificial intelligence. MIS quarterly, 45(3), 1433–1450. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2021/16274
- [11] Faraj, S., Pachidi, S., & Sayegh, K. (2018). Working and organizing in the age of the learning algorithm. Information and organization, 28(1), 62–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2018.02.005
- [12] Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control. Academy of management annals, 14(1), 366–410. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2018.0174
- [13] Dellermann, D., Ebel, P., Söllner, M., & Leimeister, J. M. (2019). Hybrid intelligence. Business & information systems engineering, 61(5), 637–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-019-00595-2
- [14] Seeber, I., Bittner, E., Briggs, R. O., De Vreede, T., De Vreede, G. J., Elkins, A., Maier, R., Merz, A. B., Oeste-Reiß, S., Randrup, N., Schwabe, G., & Söllner, M. (2020). Machines as teammates: A research agenda on AI in team collaboration. Information & management, 57(2), 103174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2019.103174
- [15] Noy, S., & Zhang, W. (2023). Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence. Science, 381(6654), 187–192. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh2586
- [16] Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D., & Raymond, L. R. (2025). Generative AI at work. The quarterly journal of economics, 140(2), 889–942. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae044
- [17] Dell'Acqua, F., McFowland III, E., Mollick, E., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Kellogg, K. C., Rajendran, S., ... & Lakhani, K. R. (2023). Navigating the jagged technological frontier: Field experimental evidence of the effects of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4573321
- [18] Dwivedi, Y. K., Kshetri, N., Hughes, L., Slade, E. L., Jeyaraj, A., Kar, A. K., Baabdullah, A. M., Koohang, A., Raghavan, V., Ahuja, M., et al. (2023). “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy. International journal of information management, 71, 102642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2023.102642
- [19] Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., et al. (2021). On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2108.07258
- [20] Wang, L., Ma, C., Feng, X., Zhang, Z., Yang, H., Zhang, J., Chen, Z., Tang, J., Chen, X., Lin, Y., Zhao, W. X., Wei, Z., & Wen, J. (2024). A survey on large language model based autonomous agents. Frontiers of computer science, 18, 186345. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-40231-1
- [21] Xi, Z., Chen, W., Guo, X., He, W., Ding, Y., Hong, B., Zhang, M., Wang, J., Jin, S., Zhou, E., et al. (2025). The rise and potential of large language model based agents: A survey. Science China information sciences, 68, 121101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-024-4222-0
- [22] Yao, S., Zhao, J., Yu, D., Du, N., Shafran, I., Narasimhan, K. R., & Cao, Y. (2023). ReAct: Synergizing reasoning and acting in language models. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.03629
- [23] Schick, T., Dwivedi-Yu, J., Dessì, R., Raileanu, R., Lomeli, M., Hambro, E., ... & Scialom, T. (2023). Toolformer: Language models can teach themselves to use tools. Advances in neural information processing systems, 36, 68539-68551.
- [24] Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W. t., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 9459–9474. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/hash/6b493230-Abstract.html
- [25] Amershi, S., Weld, D., Vorvoreanu, M., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Collisson, P., & Horvitz, E. (2019). Guidelines for human-AI interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300233
- [26] Lee, J. D., & See, K. A. (2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human factors, 46(1), 50–80. https://doi.org/10.1518/hfes.46.1.50_30392
- [27] Parasuraman, R., Sheridan, T. B., & Wickens, C. D. (2000). A model for types and levels of human interaction with automation. IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics—part A: Systems and humans, 30(3), 286–297. https://doi.org/10.1109/3468.844354
- [28] Glikson, E., & Woolley, A. W. (2020). Human trust in artificial intelligence: Review of empirical research. Academy of management annals, 14(2), 627–660. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2018.0057
- [29] Rudin, C. (2019). Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead. Nature machine intelligence, 1, 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0048-x
- [30] Barredo Arrieta, A., Díaz-Rodríguez, N., Del Ser, J., Bennetot, A., Tabik, S., Barbado, A., García, S., Gil-Lopez, S., Molina, D., Benjamins, R., Chatila, R., & Herrera, F. (2020). Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI. Information fusion, 58, 82–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2019.12.012
- [31] Floridi, L., Cowls, J., Beltrametti, M., Chatila, R., Chazerand, P., Dignum, V., Luetge, C., Madelin, R., Pagallo, U., Rossi, F., Schafer, B., Valcke, P., & Vayena, E. (2018). AI4People—An ethical framework for a good AI society: Opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendations. Minds and machines, 28(4), 689–707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9482-5
- [32] Jobin, A., Ienca, M., & Vayena, E. (2019). The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines. Nature machine intelligence, 1, 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2
- [33] Tabassi, E. (2023). Artificial intelligence risk management framework (AI RMF 1.0) (NIST AI 100-1). https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100-1
- [34] Autio, C., Schwartz, R., Dunietz, J., Jain, S., Stanley, M., Tabassi, E., Hall, P., & Roberts, K. (2024). Artificial intelligence risk management framework: Generative artificial intelligence profile (NIST AI 600-1). https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.600-1
- [35] International Organization for Standardization. (2023). ISO/IEC 42001:2023 information technology—artificial intelligence—management system. https://www.onetrust.com/resources/navigating-the-iso-42001-framework-ebook/?
- [36] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2024). OECD AI principles. https://oecd.ai/en/ai-principles
- [37] European Parliament & Council of the European Union. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (artificial intelligence act). https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/legislation/details/24023
- [38] Mittelstadt, B. D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S., & Floridi, L. (2016). The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate. Big data & society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716679679
- [39] Doshi-Velez, F., & Kim, B. (2017). Towards a rigorous science of interpretable machine learning. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1702.08608
- [40] Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Management Analytics and Social Insights

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.