When the history of the United States in 2025 is written, it is likely to go down as the year when the hype around AI reached a fever pitch and the beginning of a fundamental shift in how businesses approach task assignment and staffing. Many CEOs are spending millions of dollars investing in AI tools while enacting mass layoffs under the impression that thousands of humans are no longer needed as AI will fulfill many roles faster and more efficiently. In the tech industry, I have observed that the remaining employees tend to express an almost rabid enthusiasm for rapid AI adoption as their path to promotion. Or, they are careful to conceal their concerns behind a veneer of support for fear of being perceived as an obstacle to a profitable future. How do anthropologists in business break through the façade to educate others on the limits of AI’s capabilities and the risks, ethical concerns, and appropriate use cases, while still keeping their jobs? Or should they bother? After all, in the US, we are reaching a critical inflection point for anthropology as a discipline, as it is targeted by the current administration for its support of diversity and equality. This essay explores the dilemma facing anthropologists across industries as their employers forge ahead with AI adoption, often without careful consideration of the pros and cons. I offer strategies for navigating the complexities of AI hype while doing in-house evaluation of these tools based on my experience working in the tech industry.
The accelerating integration of Artificial Intelligence into organizational life is prompting a critical reckoning with how we conceptualize, deploy, and coexist with these technologies. In this essay, I argue that the prevailing tendency to anthropomorphize AI fundamentally misrepresents the capabilities and limitations of these tools, and gives short shrift to the human qualities that drive innovation, judgment, and connection in the workplace. Business anthropologists have a crucial role in shaping how to best integrate these powerful amplification tools with human cognition. As tools evolve, the boundaries will undoubtedly shift, necessitating our expertise to help navigate the front lines of human and machine interplay, and to remind business leaders of the ongoing need to nourish and invest in people as well as technology in order to address complex organizational challenges.
The market research industry has eagerly embraced artificial intelligence (AI) along with the promises of it bringing greater speed, reduced costs, and less laborious work. Advocates recommend the use of various forms of AI across the entire research process: design, execution, analysis, and reporting. While there are, indeed, benefits of utilizing AI, a critical gaze should be leveraged to ascertain appropriate uses and avoid meaningful pitfalls. Anthropologists working in market research have a vital role to play as it pertains to the use of AI. As the ongoing frequent use of AI impedes critical thinking skills, anthropologists are well situated to illuminate dimensions of the utmost importance. These include how a reliance on AI in market research may impact both the product and functioning of market research teams, how AI may impact the quality of market research, and how the use of AI in market research may amplify imbalances of power. Beyond critique, anthropologists should feel empowered to take constructive steps that will help mitigate the pitfalls of AI use in market research, while simultaneously reaping its sound benefits.
Anthropology has made a defining feature of its work to critique and interpret waves of technological change, most recently social media and digital infrastructures and currently artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, at the same time, it has struggled to harness digital innovation in order to create value for itself. Briefly looking back at the digital turn as a precedent, I suggest that anthropology risks falling into a recurring pattern with AI: Acting as a fundamental insights contributor and perceptive yet peripheral observer of technologies it does not control or commercialize. I argue that AI also offers a unique opportunity. If anthropology embraces its unrecognized and unrealized entrepreneurial mindset – viewed here as a form of cultural production – it can leverage AI to broaden its modes of expression, audiences, and impact. In this essay, I call this “to scale.”
When we put out the call for this themed issue, we placed a single question at its center: Does contemporary AI represent a fundamental shift for business anthropology – or not? More specifically, we asked whether AI marks a genuine break from the digital turn already underway in the field, or whether it is better understood as a cumulative extension of it. This introduction traces what nine essays found: a field mid-conversation, not mid-consensus. The essays, largely from a United States vantage point, approach the question from genuinely different positions – as interpreters, critics, builders, designers, and practitioners whose working lives are already shaped by AI in ways they cannot set aside. Rather than advancing a single argument, the collection offers a conversation in which contributors disagree about the nature of the shift AI represents, about whether the discipline’s primary obligation is interpretive or productive, and about the mood with which practitioners are navigating a moment of genuine uncertainty. With these questions unresolved, the introduction closes by asking: what if? If those who believe that AI is already reshaping the conditions of anthropological work prove correct, the implications may extend beyond methodology to something more fundamental: a transformation in what it means to know anthropologically and, ultimately, in what it means to be an anthropologist.
Business anthropology faces a moment of simultaneous continuity and rupture. As adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates across US organizations, the digital turn has moved from emerging possibility to disciplinary reality. Yet, the field is already standing at the threshold of something more consequential: an emerging agentic turn, characterized by AI systems capable of delegated autonomous action, goal-directed reasoning, and participation in research itself. While the theoretical and methodological foundations of business anthropology remain necessary, whether they are sufficient for the agentic turn is a question that this essay addresses. What the agentic turn introduces is an issue that prior computational approaches to interpretation only partially posed: What do anthropological knowing and doing consist of when systems can pursue interpretive goals autonomously across entire workflows rather than serving as discrete tools? In this essay, I examine both what the field brings to this moment and what the agentic turn may require beyond it. The AI Anthropology Toolkit and the multi-agent ethnography framework demonstrate one approach to what becomes possible when anthropological sensibilities shape computational systems from the ground up. In addition, it points towards why the choice is not whether to engage with agentic AI, but how to engage collectively, from inside the practice, during a formative period when the design choices that will shape these systems are still being made.
This essay reframes the discourse around large language models (LLMs) by drawing on anthropological and linguistic theories of magic as a positive transformative force. While current discussions often cast AI as mysteriously dangerous – a form of “dark magic” that beguiles users and obscures ethical concerns – we argue that LLMs represent a fundamental shift in human-technology interaction, one requiring ritualistic linguistic precision rather than technical commands. Drawing on theories of performative language and magical rites, we propose that effective prompt construction functions as ritual magic through three essential elements: clear and specific language, contextual framing, and structured sequencing. In this, we show that AI is not a singular tool operation, but rather a mode of forming a mutual cybernetic relationship. Through case studies from the AI Anthropology Toolkit, we show how skilled practitioners harness the “magical” capabilities of LLMs for analytical insights through careful prompt engineering. We then examine implications for business anthropologists working in organizational settings, exploring how this cybernetic relationship enables distributed agency and co-becoming between human expertise and computational pattern recognition. This perspective provides both a theoretical contribution to understanding human-AI interaction and practical guidance for anthropological practice in an era of increasingly sophisticated AI collaboration.
This essay – written as a reflexive field report – examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) through PreeMe, a digital health platform grounded in long-term anthropological and epidemiological research on neonatal illness trajectories, parent-infant bonding, and NICU family experiences. In the NICU, premature infants confront physiological fragility while parents navigate radical prognostic uncertainty and profound emotional overwhelm. As PreeMe develops an agentic AI chatbot, a central design question emerges: Should this nonhuman actor be named or personified? To address this, the essay introduces the concept of vi(abilities) to analyze how AI can be attuned to the organizational culture of neonatal care, supporting fragile lives, mediating relational and emotional stakes, and complementing clinical judgment without replacing it. Two additional concepts guide this inquiry: relational ecologies, which frame care as an interconnected system of human interactions critical to survival, and relational return on investment, which revalues affective and relational labor as drivers of both clinical and economic outcomes. The essay argues for designing the chatbot as a relational intelligence bridge – more than a tool, but deliberately not a person.
This editorial opens the Spring issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology. The issue consists of a collection of nine themed essays on artificial intelligence (AI) and business anthropology, edited by Matt Artz and Adam Gamwell, who have also written an introduction to the collection. In this editorial, we do not, therefore, summarize each essay and the insights of the collection, as we would usually do. For such a summary, please read the introduction by Artz and Gamwell. Instead, we offer a few thoughts on one of the core themes that runs through all the essays and, more generally, seems to be a defining feature of AI: namely, that AI appears to have finally made it an indisputable fact that things act back, being responsive in and through their relations and interactions with humans – an issue that has been explored and discussed extensively among anthropologists and other social and human scientists in the recent decades.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) presents opportunities and challenges for business anthropology. It offers analytical efficiencies, but requires well-informed, judicious use. Some anthropologists are hesitant to incorporate GenAI in their work based on their lack of understanding and/or concerns about it, including a belief that the human elements of anthropological practice will be compromised. This essay summarizes barriers to GenAI adoption among anthropologists, illustrates GenAI’s utility in research, and proposes ways for business anthropologists to apply GenAI to augment rather than replace anthropological insight. When used carefully, GenAI can enhance business anthropology by streamlining and expanding analysis while enabling anthropologists to maintain their interpretative distinctiveness. Although some anthropologists have valid concerns about using AI in their professional practice, GenAI represents a fundamental evolution, perhaps a revolution, for business anthropology that will invigorate our discipline.
Anthropology faces a dual challenge in the age of artificial intelligence (AI): integrating computation while maintaining disciplinary rigor and distinctness, as well as reclaiming public relevance. To situate these challenges, we trace a relevance gap driven by retreat from public storytelling and the rise of AI‑enabled mimicry. We argue that business anthropology offers a key for disciplinary adaptation and a blueprint for public impact. Drawing on documented experiments primarily from the context of the United States such as computational scaffolding, agile ethnography, interpretive “data friction,” and provenance‑tracked AI-ethnographer collaboration, we demonstrate how anthropologists can scale insight while preserving meaning, accountability, and context. We contend that maintaining competency and relevance in increasingly AI‑mediated societies requires not only methodological reallocation, but also accessible public storytelling that make anthropological insights legible to non‑experts.
Anthropological studies based on participant observation, with the goal of producing context-sensitive, holistic sociocultural descriptions of high-risk industries, are few and far between. This article focuses on the intentional bending and breaking of safety-related rules and regulations in the European road-based commercial goods transport sector. When accidents and other unwanted events occur in the sector, loss of life and material damage are often inevitable due to the high energies involved in truck accidents and crashes. Based on fieldwork in Norway, the article explores rule bending in day-to-day work across the transport chain, from terminal workers and truck drivers to transport company managers and owners. It highlights both the performances and the rationalizations of rule-bending behavior and provides a conceptualization of rule bending as actions that are continually deliberated in the sector and justified by the concept of “the unserious actor.” The main argument of the article is that this concept is a constructed category that both guides and restricts rule bending in the sector. This line of thinking draws on Fredrik Barth’s (2010) discussion of the continuous establishment and re-establishment of ethnic groups and boundaries – an approach that has not previously been used to understand safety and risk taking in the road-based heavy goods transport sector.
As climate change threatens cities worldwide, how does the act of escaping environmental disaster become entangled with opportunities to generate wealth? Recent projections indicate that Manila, the capital of the Philippines, will become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels. In response, the government has begun constructing New Clark City, a smart city promoted as a backup capital where government functions can escape to if climate disasters render Manila inoperable. However, New Clark City has sparked intense speculation and is marketed not only as a safe haven, but also as a lucrative investment. This article introduces the concept of speculative escape to explore the complex fusion of fleeing climate catastrophe and capitalizing on climate infrastructure. It argues that speculative escape depends on deliberate spatial and social isolation, shielding privileged groups from ecological and infrastructural breakdown. Corporate actors reinforce this narrative by promoting New Clark City as both a secure financial asset and a space of sustainability, linking survival to capital accumulation in a climate-threatened future. Through this case, the article shows how climate change is transformed into a managed and marketable vision of elite survival, revealing how climate escape is shaped by exclusionary practices and uneven politics of adaptation.
This essay is based on an ethnography by Parker Shipton (2011) of a World Bank development effort in Africa which failed spectacularly. The reason for its failure – and all similarly conceived efforts – lies in its disregard of the ecology of social practices operating at different levels of the implementation. “Ecology of practices” is Isabelle Stengers’ (2010: 37) term for the complex of practices working symbiotically in a domain or locale. The program’s design instead embodied an a-social conception of participants as rational, self-interested economic actors. If there is a lesson to be learned beyond the need for a solid understanding of the interdependencies, it is to examine the motivation that prompts authorities to adopt an assumption that has been shown to be misleading (see, for instance, De Soto 2003). Reading between the lines of Shipton’s report, one gains the impression that there was a technocratic ideology at work behind the program’s explicit aspirations, which made it contra-indicated to consider local conditions and practices. The knowledge of local practices was available and might have made the program successful. However, it was ignored in order to promote globalization, a genuinely 1960s vision, which is today coming undone.
Recent decades have witnessed a growing reliance on ethnographic methods in consumer research to bring cross-functional teams “closer” to their consumers and promote empathy. However, involving clients in ethnographic fieldwork presents new challenges for ethnographic consultants whose ethical commitments and disciplinary training may differ from that of client teams. This article considers the challenges of involving clients in fieldwork, particularly when it involves marginalized populations and/or sensitive, even taboo, discussion topics. I explore the “friction of entrenched praxis” (Chesluk and Youngblood 2023) in industry ethnography, focusing on two of its norms: the prevailing discourse of consumer empathy and the involvement of clients in ethnographic fieldwork. Through reference to a project in which I participated as a qualitative market researcher, I raise critical questions for anthropologists working in industry to consider when evaluating the ethical dimensions of client involvement. To this end, I encourage setting non-negotiable boundaries to protect the participants.
In this essay, I take stock of the existing entanglements and possible future symbiosis between anthropology and entrepreneurship, both as a field of research and as a practice of venture creation. While anthropologists have studied entrepreneurship as an economic phenomenon (anthropology of entrepreneurship) and have more modestly entered into direct conversation with this field (anthropology in entrepreneurship), I propose that there is an alternative way in which the discipline can make an impact and assert its value in the realm of new venture creation. To substantiate this proposition, I showcase how anthropologists and founders share affinities of practice. Specifically examining uncertainty, failure, and pivoting as fundamental to both how anthropological knowledge is generated and how venture creation unfolds, I argue that, seen in this way, anthropological practice and thinking can be understood as fundamental to business creation.
In Uganda, green charcoal – briquettes made of carbonized biochar from agricultural residues – has the potential to replace wood charcoal. This can contribute to halting deforestation and reducing national carbon emissions. Yet, the acceptance of green charcoal by consumers is very slow. In this article, using Michael Porter’s value chain model, we present a comprehensive and holistic model describing the conditions for successful production and marketing of briquettes by private businesses. Based primarily on observations of production and interviews conducted with Ugandan enterprises producing green charcoal, green finance organizations, green charcoal consumers, and wood charcoal producers, we describe barriers impeding access to capital, the production of a competitive product, and the marketing of green charcoal briquettes. Since one barrier has an impact on the entire production and marketing chain, we argue that all aspects of the green charcoal enterprise must work simultaneously to successfully compete with wood charcoal. Financial institutions and governmental policies must also support the green charcoal value chain.
This is a companion piece to the “Voices of Green” film. Watch the film here: Voices of Green This companion piece to the ethnographic film Voices of Green by Hannah Birch examines local perspectives on green transitions in Denmark, focusing on how inhabitants on the Danish island of Bornholm organize and act on climate change through business development centered around local ownership. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at two field sites – a local renewable energy project and a regenerative farm – in the autumn of 2024, our initial analytical aim was to understand co-ownership between the locals and the nation-state. However, our interlocutors stressed that co-ownership could not be understood or practiced without local ownership, which they viewed as a form of organization in which residents themselves drive transitions in and from local businesses. Yet, they experienced multiple political and economic obstacles to develop these transition-oriented businesses based on local ownership. In this companion piece to the film, we argue that visual anthropology opens up the concept and practice of ownership, which is crucial for both understanding and supporting local action in developing businesses capable of contributing to the green transitions called for.
