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Artificial intelligence (AI) and people’s interactions with it—through virtual agents, socialbots, and language-generation software—do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that have long focused on human–human communication. To address this disconnect between communication theory and emerging technology, this article provides a starting point for articulating the differences between communicative AI and previous technologies and introduces a theoretical basis for navigating these conditions in the form of scholarship within human–machine communication (HMC). Drawing on an HMC framework, we outline a research agenda built around three key aspects of communicative AI technologies: (1) the functional dimensions through which people make sense of these devices and applications as communicators, (2) the relational dynamics through which people associate with these technologies …