Agentic AI is being heralded as the next step in the development of AI systems. Agentics – complex ensembles of different machine learning, data processing, and generative AI models – can provide new autonomous and proactive decision-making capabilities to organizations, participate in complex workflows, and, when needed, seek guidance from and provide insights to human users in natural languages.

In this project, funded by a seed fund to establish new collaborations between the Universities of Edinburgh and Toronto, we have been developing a network of researchers and practitioners interested in exploring how and why to design agentic systems. We are particularly interested in designing such systems to be situated within specific social and organizational contexts, to explore the value of social theory and perspectives to this work, and the potential of this move to address critical issues with AI.

As part of the project we have been running workshops and events as part of several large conferences. This includes a Social Agentics workshop at ACM COMPASS 2025 in Toronto, a Special Interest Group session at ACM CSCW 2025 in Bergen, and a workshop at the CASCON 2025 conference.