ICIS 2026 Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on Autonomous Scholarship

AI systems like AlphaFold have already transformed empirical, computational research, solving decades-old challenges in molecular biology and drug discovery. Now this revolution is accelerating across other fields. In July 2026, an AI model disproved the Jacobian conjecture, a problem that had stood open since 1939, with a counterexample short enough to fit in a social-media post. Days later, an AI system recovered signing keys for HAWK, a post-quantum signature candidate in NIST’s standardization process, and found a 200-800X improvement to the best known attack on a reduced-round version of AES, a cipher built into virtually every computer and smartphone. In each case, the model did most of the work, and humans supplied direction and, above all, verification.

Results like these raise a question the Information Systems (IS) community can no longer defer: what does scholarship look like when a model can formulate a research question, design a study, analyze the data, and write the paper? Our field has always studied how individuals and organizations adopt, use, and are transformed by information technology. It is time to ask the same question of ourselves — and leading venues are already asking it, with special issue calls on AI-enabled research at ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems and Information Systems Research.

The ICIS 2026 Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on Autonomous Scholarship moves from discussion to experimentation. Participants will use generative AI to develop innovative contributions on IS topics, and reflect openly on the process. Submissions will be reviewed through an AI-based process, making the workshop an experiment in autonomous scholarship on both sides of the desk: authoring and reviewing. Throughout, the PDW will run as a transparent, end-to-end experiment whose design decisions, data, and failure modes can feed directly into IS debates on human-AI collaboration, peer review, and research governance.

The workshop will be held at the 2026 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2026) in Lisbon, Portugal, December 13–16, 2026. Full details, including submission guidelines and key dates, will follow in the upcoming Call for Papers.