‘The end user takes the final decision’

While social sciences are brimming with attention for the transformations brought about by AI and digital technology, the aspect of communication has received remarkably little attention. Niklas Luhmann's social system theory, which conceives social systems as constituted through ongoing communication, is particularly well equipped to make a relevant contribution. This paper investigates the Impact of AI on organisations as systems of decision‐communications, along the lines of four distinctions: decision premise–decision, system memory–environment, organisation system–interaction system and structural coupling–loose coupling. The deployment of AI is a reaction to the growing societal differentiation and the resulting future‐related contingency, and as such contributes to the viability of organisations as systems. Nevertheless, social systems theory explains how certain impacts of AI we witness, some of them potentially harmful to the viability of the organisation, are neither incidental nor temporal but are structurally related to the basic operations of organisations. A proposal is made how reflection loops can be introduced to counter some of these consequences.