Am 25. September 2026 hielt Daniel Fürstenau einen Gastvortag im Distinguished Scholars Seminar an der Queen’s University, Ontario, Kanada, Smith School of Business:

Title. AI, Agency, and Social Impact.

Abstract. A central shift of our time is this: where we used to ask how information systems are embedded in work, we now ask what agency those systems exercise. That shift raises new questions for Information Systems (IS) scholarship, about the division of labor between human and system, about how human judgment is preserved, and about how you steer a system that decides parts of the task itself. In development, we ask: how do you – and how should you – build such a system so that the organization itself remains capable of acting? I pursue this through several cases: an AI assistant on a large public learning platform, language models supporting mental health diagnosis, and AI in clinical work. In all of them, similar trade-offs recur, and I explore them in the talk. I argue that they deserve to be made explicit, draw out what this means for IS research, and close with an invitation to collaborate.

Bio. Daniel Fürstenau is Professor of Business Administration, IT Management and Digital Transformation at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where he leads the research group on Digital Transformation. He is also a Board Member of the Einstein Center Digital Future in Berlin, holds a part-time position at Charité Berlin, and is part-time Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Daniel studies how digital and data infrastructures, and AI systems are governed, implemented, and sustained in healthcare and other knowledge-intensive organizational settings, with current work on agentic AI in healthcare. His work has been published in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Information Systems Journal, as well as in management and digital health outlets. He is an Associate Editor at the Information Systems Journal and a Member of the Association for Information Systems, the Academy of Management, and the German Informatics Society.