Artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape of education, not as a tool of efficiency but as a co-creator of pedagogical meaning. This study investigates how educators negotiate their professional, ethical, and epistemic roles within AI-mediated learning environments, revealing teaching as a dynamic process of transformative negotiation rather than technological adaptation. Drawing on an exploratory mixed- method design that combined phenomenological interviews with computational network analysis of 42 educators across Asian higher education institutions, the research advances a new theoretical lens integrating Sociocultural Activity Theory and Actor–Network Theory. The findings show that educators’ engagement with AI is driven emerges through recursive interaction, where human and machine intelligences co- construct evolving learning ecologies. This reconfiguration challenges instrumentalist models of AI adoption and introduces the concept of relational reflexivity to describe how pedagogical authority is continually redefined. The study offers theoretical, methodological, and practical innovations, reframing AI in education as a dialogical partner in the co-production of knowledge. It concludes by urging institutions and policymakers to foster collaborative, ethically grounded frameworks that empower educators to think and create with, rather than against, artificial intelligence.