From Algorithmic Management to Organizational Cognitive Ecology

The central organizational challenge emerging from AI-mediated environments is no longer automation itself, but the preservation of adaptive strategic judgment in cognitively pre-structured environments. As Artificial Intelligence evolves from operational tool to infrastructural environment, organizations increasingly operate within systems that shape informational salience, legitimacy, prioritization and interpretive possibility upstream of conscious deliberation. The strategic risk concerns the gradual convergence of organizational reasoning under optimization-oriented infrastructures, eroding the very capabilities — recognizing weak signals, generating hypotheses not derived from data, problematizing the evident, formulating value judgments on competing ends — through which organizations preserve adaptive strategic judgment under uncertainty.

Building on Chiriatti et al.'s System 0 and Floridi's information philosophy, the paper develops the concept of cognitively pre-structured environments and identifies the principal mechanism as transversal atrophy through disuse, distinct from deskilling as its observable symptom. The mechanism is zonally differentiated. Where AI is pervasive — planning, forecasting, allocation, control — interpretive and deliberative capabilities atrophy through reduced exercise; the damage manifests in activities requiring them at higher intensity — innovation, hypothesis generation, deliberation on ends. System 0 is read not as autonomous technological rupture, but as infrastructural acceleration of a longer historical trajectory rooted in Taylorism, psychometrics and quantitative managerial rationality, now extended from the productive gesture to the whole person through algorithmic management.

The risk remains invisible to a managerial culture that reads AI through an efficiency lens, neither recognizing the diffuse collateral effects on judgment capabilities nor questioning efficiency as sole legitimate criterion in contexts demanding confrontation between values in tension. The shift required is therefore cultural, not technological.

The paper proposes Organizational Cognitive Ecology (OCE) as the operating framework that translates this cultural shift into organizational devices. OCE constitutes the political repositioning of the HR mandate from Resource Management to Judgment Enablement, and articulates three integrated levels — Cognitive Architecture Design, Human–AI Decision Governance, Artistic Intelligence Capability Building — with cluster-specific application: as integrated mitigation in AI-mediated activities; as primary capability development in non-AI-mediated activities. The framework is empirically testable through two independent hypotheses, falsifiable separately: H₁ on atrophy prevention through three-level integration, H₂ on capability development through Artistic Intelligence, validated by a mixed-methods quasi-experimental longitudinal design pre-registered on OSF.

Future organizational competitiveness will depend not on AI adoption, but on the capacity to preserve cognitive plurality, interpretive sovereignty and adaptive strategic judgment in environments progressively shaped by infrastructural optimization.