BAI Europe · Ten-Part Series for Engineering & Management Education

Drawing the Line
: Agency & Governance in Agentic AI

Ten articles for the mentors who decide what the next generation of engineers and managers is taught — before they ever sit across the table from a regulator, a board, or a supervisor. Agentic AI does not simply transfer agency from a human to a machine. It creates a tension, and a possible complementarity, between two forms of agency that must now share the same decision space.

Publishing every other Thursday · 1 Oct 2026 – 18 Feb 2027 Opens with The Oldest Question in New Clothes

Subscribe to the Series See the Ten Articles

What This Series Is

One connected subject, taught in two disciplines that rarely meet

Ten articles, each standing alone, together making a single case: engineering curricula and management curricula have each, separately, begun reacting to pieces of agentic AI governance — almost none are teaching it as one connected problem. The series opens with The Oldest Question in New Clothes and moves through three movements: the philosophical foundations of agency and responsibility, the Three Agentic Gaps as they appear in both system architecture and board practice, and the institutional work of teaching and governing this material well.

Who reads it: University professors and program managers designing engineering and management curricula, graduate students in both fields, and anyone building the courses that will shape how the next generation reasons about where human agency ends and AI agency begins.

65%

Of senior governance leaders cite a lack of governance processes to guide agentic AI decision-making as a top concern. (Diligent Institute, Governance Institute of Australia & Singapore Institute of Directors, 2026 APAC Governance Outlook)

2 in 3

Directors say their own boards don’t know enough about AI to govern it well — the same readiness gap current research finds across higher education’s curricular response to agentic AI. (EY, 2025)

Why Educators Subscribe

Six reasons this isn’t another AI-in-the-classroom newsletter

Philosophy meets specification

Meaningful human control moved from a philosophical account to an operationalized engineering framework in 2025 — the series teaches the translation step by step, not just the theory or just the spec.

Responsibility gaps, mapped

From autonomous weapons and self-driving cars to enterprise agentic workflows — the same gap, traced through two decades of scholarship, applied to the systems your students will build.

Authority engineered, not asserted

The difference between a boundary enforced at the platform layer and one that exists only in a policy document — made concrete with a live governance framework as the worked example.

One classroom, two disciplines

Every article carries a teaching hook built for a joint engineering/management session — not a separate elective for each, which is precisely the gap most curricula haven’t closed yet.

Group agency, taken seriously

Multi-agent systems break the classical single-actor model of responsibility twice over — the series is one of the few places teaching group and emergent agency as a governance problem, not just a safety footnote.

Named sources, not composites

Every claim traces to a dated, verifiable academic or trade-press source — a full APA bibliography accompanies the series, because that discipline is what a professor should expect before assigning it.

The Ten Articles

Three movements: foundations, structure, institutions

Foundations What agency is, and why agentic AI strains it

The Oldest Question in New Clothes

What “agency” meant before AI had any — guidance control, reasons-responsiveness, and the philosophical foundation beneath meaningful human control.

1 Oct 2026Publishing

Whose Decision Was It?

Responsibility gaps from autonomous weapons to autonomous workflows — and the newer distinction between responsibility gaps and control gaps.

15 Oct 2026Coming

Group Agency and the Limits of the Individual Frame

Why multi-agent systems break classical, single-actor accounts of responsibility — and what emergent agency at the level of the collective requires instead.

29 Oct 2026Coming

Structural Manifestations The Three Agentic Gaps, in architecture and in practice

The Accountability Gap, from the Classroom to the Boardroom

Why the accountability failure is almost never technical negligence — it’s an unassigned policy layer, in supervisory findings and in board practice alike.

12 Nov 2026Coming

The Reasoning Gap

Why auditability is a design requirement, not a debugging tool — tracking and tracing conditions, and what a reasoning-chain log actually has to capture.

26 Nov 2026Coming

The Authority Gap

Boundaries a model cannot talk its way out of — a technical case study contrasting runtime-enforced constraints with model-inference-level instructions.

10 Dec 2026Coming

Meaningful Human Control, Operationalized

The bridge between ethics and engineering curricula — how philosophical principle becomes an actionable, buildable specification.

7 Jan 2027Coming

Institutional Response Teaching, governing, and building the field

Teaching the Tension

Why agency and governance belong in the same course, not two — a pedagogical case for program managers and curriculum designers, with a joint syllabus skeleton.

21 Jan 2027Coming

Who Governs the Governors?

Board oversight as a graduate management case study — a mock boardroom exercise built directly from current director-readiness research.

4 Feb 2027Coming

The Practitioner Intelligence Gap

What only universities can build next — and why the shared practitioner intelligence this field needs should be built deliberately, not accumulated one examination at a time.

18 Feb 2027Coming