Capabilities, limits, and complementarity
AI and Strategic Judgment
What contemporary AI systems can do, where they fail, and how organizations should combine machine articulation with human judgment.
Associate Professor · University of California, Merced
AI, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
I study where artificial intelligence provides genuine leverage in strategic judgment—and how entrepreneurs construct new possibilities through strategically generative agreement structures.
Mean Articulation Machines
Where do large language models provide genuine strategic leverage—and where does their association-based architecture remain mismatched to the task?
LLMs are remarkably capable articulation systems. Their strategic value depends on recognizing which activities benefit from recombination, fluency, and broad association—and which depend on causal explanation, relevance selection, novelty, and judgment outside the statistical mean.
Research
How do humans and artificial systems identify, evaluate, and construct new possibilities?
Explore
Constructing new economic possibilities
Entrepreneurship and Deontic Engineering
How entrepreneurs create resources and strategic freedom by constructing agreements, rights, duties, access, control, and participation.
The architecture of social reality
Social Ontology and Organizations
How collective recognition and deontic structures constitute firms, opportunities, resources, authority, and coordinated action.
A thirty-year trajectory
AI before and beyond the current cycle.
Research, teaching, software, and institution-building form a continuous record rather than a newly adopted label.
1995–1998
Artificial intelligence research
Lexington Institute and early machine-intelligence work.
1998
Can Computers Think?
Co-authored seven argument maps and authored Maps 1, 4, and 6.
2006–2013
Software entrepreneurship
Founded Psyex Software & Consulting; programmed at UC Berkeley.
2007
Studied with Lotfi Zadeh
Father of fuzzy logic, UC Berkeley.
2009–2012
AI teaching
Four Artificial Intelligence course offerings at SUPINFO in France.
2019
Forms of AI
Distinguished human-like implemented AI from human problem-solving AI.
2022
AI and governance
Published on AI, corporate governance, markets, and impact capitalism.
2025
AI tools for entrepreneurship
Redesigned Introduction to Entrepreneurship around the use and evaluation of AI tools.
2025
10Xefficiency.com
AI startup.
2026
AI and strategy
Published Mean Articulation Machines in Strategy Science.
Current
Evaluation infrastructure
Point-in-time models, model portfolios, and agent and harness evaluation.
Signature digital scholarship · 1998
Can Computers Think?
Seven large-format maps of the foundational debate over machine intelligence.
Created by Robert E. Horn, Jeff Yoshimi, Mark Deering, and Russ McBride. McBride authored Maps 1, 4, and 6. The complete original series can be explored at high resolution and downloaded freely.
Current work
Research in progress.
Active programs connect conceptual analysis to AI evaluation, organizational design, and entrepreneurial practice.
01
In development
Point-in-Time AI
Temporally controlled models and evaluation infrastructure for prediction, belief updating, information choice, and intervention testing.
Project details02
Research program
Low-Correlation AI Model Portfolios
Research on joint failure, marginal rescue, model-by-harness interaction, and efficient combinations of differently capable AI systems.
Project details03
Book and field program
Pragmatic Entrepreneurship
A practical and theoretical approach to entrepreneurship centered on constructing new possibilities through strategically generative agreements.
Project details04
Theory development
Deontic Engineering
Research on the deliberate construction of rights, duties, permissions, authority, access, and control as a form of entrepreneurial design.
Project detailsTeaching · Spring 2025
AI tools for entrepreneurship
Introduction to Entrepreneurship was redesigned with contemporary AI tools as the working environment for research, venture development, communication, and execution.
The course treated AI neither as a single lecture nor as an unquestioned answer engine. Students used and evaluated AI throughout the entrepreneurial process.
Explore the teaching case15
weeks of applied and critical AI use
Official course: MIST 50
Introduction to Entrepreneurship
UC Merced
Selected scholarship
Publications
Peer-reviewed work across AI, entrepreneurship, social ontology, cognition, and finance.
View the complete record2026
Journal article · AI & strategy
Mean Articulation Machines
Strategy Science 11(1), 31–54
Identifies which strategic tasks are well matched to LLM capabilities and which still require forms of judgment current systems do not reliably provide.
2024
Journal article · Entrepreneurship
Rogue Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 48(1), 392–417
Develops a category of entrepreneurial action built around claims that violate established or expert consensus.
Publisher / DOIAccepted manuscript being prepared
2022
Journal article · AI & strategy · Finance
How AI Affects the Future Relationship Between Corporate Governance and Financial Markets: A Note on Impact Capitalism
Managerial Finance 48(8), 1240–1249
Examines how AI can mediate the relationship among socially responsible investment, corporate governance, and financial markets.
Publisher / DOIAccepted manuscript being prepared
2022
Journal article · Finance
Ulcer Index 2.6: A Better Risk Measure?
The Journal of Wealth Management 25(3), 59–71
Proposes a more sensitive variant of the Ulcer Index for measuring investment drawdown risk.
Publisher / DOIAccepted manuscript being prepared
2022
Journal article · Entrepreneurship · Social ontology
Social Objectivity and Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Academy of Management Review 47(1), 75–92
Shows how opportunities can be ontologically subjective while becoming epistemologically objective through social change.
Publisher / DOIAccepted manuscript being prepared
2022
Journal article · Social ontology
Deontic Binding: Imposed, Voluntary, and Autogenic
Social Epistemology 36(2), 218–237
Distinguishes three ways agents become bound by rights, duties, commitments, and other deontic structures.
Latest writing
Research Notes
Substantive notes between formal publication cycles.
Read all notesFrom Can Computers Think? to Mean Articulation Machines
What changed between the foundational machine-intelligence debate of 1998 and the strategic questions posed by large language models—and what did not.
Read noteWhat I Learned Teaching Entrepreneurship Entirely Around AI Tools
Reflections on redesigning a Spring 2025 Introduction to Entrepreneurship course with AI as the working environment rather than a supplementary topic.
Read noteWhat Large Language Models Can and Cannot Do in Strategy
A task-based account of genuine LLM leverage, misplaced reliance, and the continuing role of human strategic judgment.
Read noteContact
Seminars, visiting appointments, and collaboration.
For seminar and talk invitations, academic appointments, and research inquiries.
Contact Russ McBride