Soumitra Dutta ‚ former dean of Oxford's Said Business School and AI scholar‚ points to a development that most of the academic world has not yet fully absorbed․ We have crossed into what he and others are calling 'agentic science'․ Not an AI that helps a researcher work faster․ Not a tool that drafts paragraphs or formats citations․ Autonomous systems that can articulate a question‚ develop a method to answer it‚ perform an experiment‚ analyze the results‚ and iterate through the entire process without the need for human approval at every step. In this scenario‚ researchers are the conductors, the editors and the final check․
A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution, which Dutta references, is worth reading. “The train has left the station,” it says. The question is not whether research changes‚ but who is to be in charge of that change․
Soumitra Dutta 's prescription is to develop fluency working with agent systems rather against them and to focus on the theoretical and philosophical elements of research that automated systems can't emulate. “Double down on theory and judgment – these become more valuable as production is automated,” he says. “For those willing to adapt, now is a moment of extraordinary opportunity”․
Historically, research power has been concentrated in a small number of well-funded institutions. Agentic AI changes that arithmetic: a scientist at a university with no research infrastructure whatsoever suddenly has access to tools that used to require a whole research group to develop․ The geography of knowledge production is being redrawn․
The negative side of this? Bear in mind that academic publishing is already overloaded‚ and reviewers are in short supply․ Agentic AI could drive an explosion of algorithmically generated‚ technically competent but substantively thin work, making peer review unviable. “Trust will depend on how research is produced and acknowledged,” says Soumitra Dutta .
What has been Soumitra Dutta's track record as an entrepreneur?
Dutta has been an entrepreneur in parallel to his academic career․ His first set of entrepreneurial ventures started at INSEAD‚ when he set up and ran three strategy consultancies focused on new technologies and innovation, which he later sold․
His earliest major venture was the social media analytics company Fisheye Analytics․ Founded in 2008 and sold to WPP Communications Group in 2013‚ the company was an early player in the social media intelligence space‚ before it was generally acknowledged that social data had business value․
In 2019‚ while remaining a professor at Cornell‚ Dutta founded Igesia‚ an EdTech company․ Igesia is a live online learning platform for executive education courses delivered globally by business school professors from premier business schools․ This showed Dutta's belief in the potential of management education beyond elite business schools․
Dutta's latest endeavors are in AI․ He is co-founder of Caasaa‚ an AI-native software development startup focused on business process automation and transformation‚ and NexiVerify‚ an AI verification company where he also serves as Chief Scientific Officer․ To allow each output of the AI model to be independently verified‚ NexiVerify uses cryptographic receipts․
In a period of around 30 years‚ Dutta has founded or co-founded at least six companies in the fields of analytics‚ EdTech and AI․
