From Digital Turn to Agentic Turn: Continuity and Rupture in Business Anthropology

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.