The Washington Operations Workshop convenes scholars and practitioners in Operations Management to advance emerging research frontiers and catalyze durable collaboration. Building on the momentum of prior WOW convenings, WOW 3.0 will focus on agentic and autonomous AI in operations. As AI systems evolve from prediction tools into agents that plan, decide, and execute, the binding constraint is increasingly the design and governance of the operating system around these agents—the workflows, incentives, controls, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms that make deployment reliable over time. Many organizations can prototype impressive models; far fewer can deploy AI agents that remain robust under shifting data and incentives, across multi-step workflows, and amid rising expectations for safety, accountability, and sustainability. WOW 3.0 will create a focused forum to define the research agenda, share emerging evidence, and form durable cross-sector collaborations.
WOW 3.0 treats agentic and autonomous AI as a socio-technical production system. Operational performance hinges on how autonomy is allocated and bounded across the lifecycle: what an agent is permitted to do, what must be verified before action, what triggers escalation or deferral, how overrides are incorporated without creating new failure modes, and how performance is monitored as conditions evolve. The workshop will emphasize that autonomy is sequential and interactive, so failures often emerge from chains of decisions, feedback delays, and handoffs across humans, tools, and multiple agents. It will foreground rigorous measurement beyond average performance, including drift stability, violation rates, tail risk, and the operational cost of oversight.
The workshop will also address the infrastructure realities of autonomy. Agentic systems consume compute continuously, making data centers, energy, and water binding operational constraints with material environmental implications. WOW 3.0 will examine spillovers under scarcity and interdependence, as well as the roles of geopolitics and competition in shaping hardware availability, capacity expansion, and operational risk. The goal is to build a coherent, conference-wide research agenda for autonomous operations that is theoretically grounded, empirically tractable, and practically consequential.
Program and speakers coming soon.
Conference Co-chairs:
Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari Professor, Carey Business School
Leann Thayaparan, assistant professor, Carey Business School