Advancing Smart OR stewardship: GenAI literacy for Soft OR practitioners

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into organisational meetings and workshops. Promoted for their potential to enhance efficiency through automated summarisation, clustering, mediation, and simulation, these technologies are reshaping the socio-technical conditions that underpin Soft OR and Problem Structuring Methods. This study develops a Soft OR-grounded GenAI literacy orientation that prioritises stewardship over automation in facilitative practice. Building on established Soft OR scholarship, six core commitments are articulated and translated into six sensitising literacy questions for GenAI-mediated facilitation. Publicly available documentation for twelve GenAI applications designed for meetings, workshops, and deliberative work is analysed. The findings illustrate that these systems may standardise problem framings, shift interpretive authority from participants to modelling applications, present algorithmic outputs as closure, and prioritise convergence at the expense of maintaining openness to plural worldviews. The resulting risk is conceptualised as Synthetic Closure, defined as the premature stabilisation of meaning through algorithmically generated artefacts that simulate coherence or agreement without replicating the participatory work necessary for legitimacy in Soft OR. The study advocates for Smart OR stewardship as a facilitative stance that upholds Soft OR’s foundational commitments within hybrid human–AI environments.