Can humans gain authority by managing how AI agency gets attributed?

Comparing three organizational contexts — radiological diagnosis, AI scheduling assistants, and police predictive analytics — Leonardi reports that, "perhaps most surprisingly," all three cases show "humans can actually enhance their power and influence through strategic management of agency attribution rather than simply losing control to AI systems." In each, the final configuration gave humans "new forms of authority that were unavailable before AI implementation": "radiologists gained authority as expert interpreters who could integrate AI insights with clinical knowledge in ways that neither humans nor AI could achieve independently," "scheduling principals gained authority as social mediators who could manage complex human-AI relationships and navigate impression management challenges," and "police officers gained authority as knowledge curators who could shape organizational understanding while maintaining technological legitimacy."

The mechanism Leonardi gives is path dependence within the agency loop: "early experiences with agency attribution shape subsequent patterns in ways that can lock human-AI relationships into particular trajectories." In radiology, "early experiences of AI identifying missed pathology created conditions for productive interrogation practices"; in scheduling, "early experiences of social delegation created conditions for ongoing mediation strategies"; in policing, "early experiences of opacity created conditions for substitution approaches." Because these early phases are "particularly crucial for determining long-term outcomes," he concludes that "organizations cannot simply deploy AI systems and expect optimal human-AI relationships to emerge naturally—they must actively guide early attribution processes toward beneficial patterns."

This is the case-level payoff of Does attributing agency to AI actually reduce human sense of control?, and it complicates Does incremental AI replacement erode human influence over society?: where that thesis treats declining human labor participation as eroding the implicit alignment that keeps societal systems responsive to human preferences, Leonardi's cases show professional authority being reconstituted, not simply lost, as AI absorbs parts of the work — though the two are not strictly in conflict, since Leonardi's claim is about domain-specific organizational authority (interpreter, mediator, curator roles) rather than the macro, cross-system alignment that gradual disempowerment addresses. It also runs parallel to Can AI systems delegate tasks back to humans?, in that both describe delegation running in an unexpected or reconfigured direction rather than flowing one way from human to machine.

The claim rests on a comparison of three qualitative organizational cases within a single paper's own analysis, not a larger sample or an independent replication, so how reliably "strategic management of agency attribution" produces enhanced authority — versus depending on conditions specific to these professions, such as existing professional status or legal structure — is not established here. The excerpt also does not specify what distinguishes successful "strategic management" from the mismanagement that would instead produce the power displacement described elsewhere in the paper, leaving open how an organization would recognize, in practice, which of its early attribution patterns are "beneficial."