# The Organizational Behavior of Agentic AI: Collective Intelligence in Human-Agent Workflows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30986/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 5 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11462/) (2023)
- [A new sociology of humans and machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14410/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed not as a single assistant but as a collective of planners, solvers, reviewers, memory managers, tool users, and orchestrators. These systems are entering organisational workflows under familiar labels such as teams, managers, committees, markets, and workflows. This article asks whether such agent collectives exhibit organisational behaviour in a sense that is analytically comparable to, yet distinct from, human organisational behaviour. I argue that agentic AI is a partial organisational analogue. It resembles a human organisation because it differentiates work, coordinates interdependence, performs recurrent routines, crosses boundaries, and produces collective outcomes. It differs because these patterns are not sustained by motivation, identity, trust, employment, socialisation, or moral accountability. They are sustained by context architecture: prompts, memory, traces, schemas, tools, validators, and permissions. The article develops contextual transaction cost as the central mechanism linking these similarities and differences. Computational theorising, synthetic task simulations, real LLM agent traces, and robustness analyses show that human-imitation forms often underperform when they add lossy handoffs, correlated deliberation, and verification burdens, whereas shared-state and adaptive forms perform better when they make context durable, inspectable, and task-contingent. The article contributes to organisation studies by theorising agentic AI as an emerging object of organising and by specifying the interface conditions under which human and agentic organisational behaviour can jointly support collective intelligence.
