The Institutionally-Embedded Pedagogical Agent (IEPA): A Definition and Research Agenda

We introduce and formally define the Institutionally-Embedded Pedagogical Agent (IEPA): a pedagogical AI system built as a first-party, internal component of a single educational institution and operated in situ within it, rather than integrated from the outside as a third-party service. We give a component-wise formal definition (a tuple of agent core, live institutional integration, domain knowledge base, pedagogical model, governance/safety, and ownership relation), distinguish the class from bolted-on services and general-purpose assistants by its live integration and in-house ownership, note that mature instances are agentic and always-on rather than ask-response, situate the class within the intelligent-tutoring-systems, retrieval-augmented-generation and LLM-routing literatures, and propose a research agenda. This paper makes a conceptual contribution; empirical grounding is provided by a companion technical report of a live single-institution deployment (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21203519).