Refreshments are available starting at 10:30 a.m. The seminar will begin at 10:45 a.m.
Abstract
Where, exactly, does judgment reside in contemporary AI systems? Prevailing approaches to AI governance tend to locate decision-making at the point of output, where human oversight, auditing, and accountability are typically applied. But in many deployed systems, what appears to be a “decision” at the output layer has already been structured upstream—through objective functions, training data, and system design. This talk argues that we are moving from decision-support systems to decision-structuring systems. Once decisions are shaped at the level of design, traditional models of oversight no longer capture where judgment is actually exercised. Through a series of concrete examples drawn from domains such as hiring, navigation, and conversational AI, the talk shows how system architecture increasingly defines the range and character of downstream choices. The argument then turns to a second question: As AI systems begin to mediate functions traditionally associated with human deliberation, evaluation, and decision-making, how should we understand the role of human judgment itself? The displacement and sharing of these functions raises new challenges for accountability, responsibility, and governance, and points toward a need to rethink where—and in whom—judgment resides in AI-mediated environments.
Speaker Biography
Michael A. Santoro is professor of management and entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, where he also directs the Business and Human Rights Lab. He previously served on the faculty at Rutgers University for two decades. Santoro received his PhD in public policy from Harvard University and holds a JD from the New York University School of Law. Santoro’s work examines how institutional design, system architecture, and governance frameworks shape the exercise of judgment and responsibility in complex organizational and technological systems. His recent research focuses on AI-enabled decision-making, including agentic AI systems, the limits of human oversight, and how system-level design redistributes agency in human and machine interactions. He is the author or co-author of five books, including work on ethics and decision-making in the pharmaceutical industry, on values and incentives in financial markets, and on global business and human rights in China, and has held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Hong Kong. His scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and has received multiple awards, including recognition from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Santoro is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) and has served on the editorial boards of leading journals in ethics, human rights, and public policy. He has advised organizations across the public and private sectors on issues at the intersection of technology and governance, including work with emerging firms developing agentic AI systems.