Human-machine communication has emerged as a new relational context of education and should become a priority for instructional scholarship in the coming years. With artificial intelligence and robots offering personalized instruction, teachers' roles may shift toward overseers who design and select machine-led instruction, monitor student progress, and provide support. In this essay, we argue that bringing the sensibilities of instructional researchers to bear on these issues involving machine agents, within and outside the traditional classroom walls, is vitally important.