Conference Theme

EPIC2025 explores Intelligences – the multiple, collective, and distributed capabilities of social, technical, business, and environmental systems.

How are models of intelligence driving – but also constraining – our capacities for innovation? Deeper engagement with multiple intelligences has critical strategic value for organizations. Questions about what intelligences are, and who or what ‘has’ them, are about AI but also much more. How we define, design, use, reproduce, and re-imagine intelligences is fundamental to our work across all sectors and industries.

Ethnography illuminates how intelligences are embedded and embodied in practices of everyday life. Beyond a specific capacity that an individual, species, or machine may have, intelligences can emerge in collectives and inhabit systems and relationships that are symbolic, sociotechnical, material, and ecological. Intelligences are a source of possibility and productivity, but we also know that models of intelligence have frequently been tied to inequality, empowering some kinds of people and ways of being, while disempowering and harming others.

It is both strategically valuable and ethically critical to bring new angles and areas of expertise to the ways we model, measure, use, and shape intelligences. We invite you to join EPIC2025 to engage new kinds of intelligences and apply this knowledge to advance the goals and wellbeing of diverse people and environments.

EPIC2025 will bring robust social and interdisciplinary approaches and creative partnerships to:

• Synthesize expertise and cutting-edge findings about intelligences, from multiple fields and diverse communities, to broaden our capacities to understand and interpret behaviors and systems, analyze data, and establish the scope of our constituencies, stakeholders, markets, and opportunity spaces.
• Develop frameworks and methodologies that leverage intelligences for new kinds of insights, work practices, decision making, strategy, leadership, and organizational learning.
• Sharpen foresight and risk management with multiple intelligences to improve forecasting, R&D, and generative research, as well as to anticipate and prevent social and material harms.