Description

We all know about the infamous reviewer two. They are late with their reviews, read our paper only halfway, unduly criticize our work, and make us cite their own mediocre work. What if we replaced reviewer two with an AI reviewer? They could be more friendly, developmental, consistent, knowledgeable, timely… and would take an enormous amount of service work off our shoulders. At ICIS2026 and ECIS2027, such an AI reviewer is being trialed already – would it not be timely to see how this technology would work in our journals? Would it not be nice if we took subjective and cognitive biases out of the review process? Then again—at what cost? Would we trade resource efficiency for epistemic heterogeneity? Would we see even more submissions and review load rather than less? We talk with Hemant Bhargava, Sarah Bana, and Zhe Zhang about their proposal to infuse AI reviewer agents into the scholarly peer review process. They modeled such a workflow and have several exciting ideas about how the future of the peer review process could be explored.

Episode Reading List

• Bhargava, H. K., Bana, S. H., Zhang, Z., Brandimarte, L., Choudhary, V., Li, J. F., Loupos, P., & Zantedeschi, D. (2026). Fighting Fire with Fire: Infusing Artificial Intelligence into Peer Review to Sustain Quality Scholarship. Management Science,https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2026.00184.
• Bhargava, H. K., Brown, S. A., Ghose, A., Gupta, A., Leidner, D. E., & Wu, D. J. (2025). Exploring Generative AI’s Impact on Research: Perspectives from Senior Scholars in Management Information Systems. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 16(2), 1–9.
• Gartenberg, C., Hasan, S., Murray, A., & Pierce, L. (2026). More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review. Organization Science, 37(3), 795–812.
• Sorrell, S. (2009). Jevons’ Paradox Revisited: The Evidence for Backfire From Improved Energy Efficiency. Energy Policy, 37(4), 1456–1469.
• European Parliament. (2023). EU AI Act: First Regulation on Artificial Intelligence. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence.
• WORTH 2027: 2nd Workshop On Responsible TecH, https://sites.google.com/arizona.edu/worth.
• Russo, G., Ribeiro, M. H., Davidson, T. R., Veselovsky, V., & West, R. (2025). The AI Review Lottery: Widespread AI-Assisted Peer Reviews Boost Paper Scores and Acceptance Rates. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), 1–28.
• Ho, S. Y., Recker, J., Tan, C.-W., Vance, A., & Zhang, H. (2023). MISQ Special Issue on Registered Reports. MIS Quarterly, https://misq.umn.edu/call_for_papers/registered-reports.