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This paper adapts the Societal Capacity Assessment Framework (SCAF) to evaluate how companies deploying AI agents influence societal resilience, focusing on their role as institutional actors in shaping social and economic structures. By creating a suite of indicators that redefine vulnerability, coping, and adaptive capacities in the context of agentic AI, the authors operationalize a method for assessing the societal impact of AI deployment decisions. The application of this framework to public-facing Microsoft documents reveals critical insights into how corporate strategies can enhance or undermine societal resilience in the face of AI integration.
Companies deploying AI can significantly shape societal resilience, and this paper provides a new framework to measure their impact on this critical issue.
Companies that deploy AI agents and make them available to others are creating the sociotechnical circumstances under which this technology integrates into existing social and economic structures. AI-deploying companies are institutional actors that actively shape society's capacity to withstand and govern the consequences of agentic AI. In view of these societal impacts, companies can build societal resilience by designing and promoting safer implementations of AI agents. To operationalize this goal, this paper adapts the indicator-based Societal Capacity Assessment Framework (SCAF) to measure how a company's deployment decisions contribute to societal resilience, inverting its original measurement of societal resilience as a backdrop for deployment decisions (Gandhi et al., 2025). Our procedure has two steps: a conceptual step in which we design a suite of indicators that define what SCAF's vulnerability, coping, and adaptive capacities mean when assessing a company's agentic AI deployment decisions; and a measurement step in which we apply this framework in a structured assessment of public-facing Microsoft documents.
