A critical reassessment of intellectual capital management in the age of algorithmic management

Traditional Intellectual Capital Management (ICM) is founded on a possession-oriented perspective that assumes organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage through the accumulation, protection, and management of knowledge assets. However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), distributed intelligence, and digital platform ecosystems has introduced organizational conditions that challenge several of the assumptions underpinning traditional ICM. Existing frameworks provide limited explanation of how intellectual advantage is created within increasingly AI-mediated organizational environments, where organizational intelligence is generated through interactions among human expertise, AI technologies, and interconnected digital ecosystems. Addressing this conceptual gap, this paper critically reassesses the theoretical foundations of traditional ICM through a conceptual research design employing abductive reasoning and a critical narrative review of the literature. The analysis identifies five foundational assumptions underpinning traditional ICM and evaluates their continuing relevance in AI-mediated organizational environments. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes knowledge Orchestration as an alternative conceptual perspective that reconceptualises intellectual advantage as the organizational capability to coordinate, integrate, and govern distributed intelligence across human, technological, and relational domains. The study further reconceptualises the traditional three-capital architecture by positioning human capital as an intelligence coordination capability, structural capital as an intelligence infrastructure, and relational capital as an intelligence ecosystem. By extending traditional Intellectual Capital Management theory, the proposed framework provides a conceptual foundation for understanding intellectual advantage in the age of artificial intelligence and offers directions for future research on knowledge orchestration and human–AI collaboration.