The Worker Perspective on AI Across Occupational, Organizational, and Geographic Boundaries

This symposium aims to explore how advanced technologies using artificial intelligence (AI) are experienced and utilized by frontline workers across a range of organizational contexts, occupational groups, and geographical locations. Specifically, we examine how gig workers, blue collar workers, and professional workers in the U.S., Europe, and the Global South respond to and shape the deployment of AI technologies impacting their daily work experience in the fields of ride-hailing, factory work, nursing, and medicine, respectively. With our combined focus on understanding the workers’ experience of AI technologies, we shed light on the practices in which these workers engage and the tensions they face, and examine the downstream effect of AI use on their agency, skills, knowledge, and other important individual and organizational outcomes. Using new field and ethnographic research conducted in a range of different organizational, occupational, and geographic contexts, this symposium will: 1) elaborate a set of practices which explicate how workers from across organizational contexts, occupations, and geographies utilize AI technologies in their work, and 2) demonstrate how these practices shape important outcomes for organizations and individuals. Together, the introductory remarks to the symposium, the empirical papers, the discussion of these papers, and the question and answer session are designed to develop new theoretical insights by elaborating the commonalities and differences in how AI usage at work unfolds across occupations and contexts. Granting Algorithmic Grace: How Professionals Persist in AI Use Despite Its Frequent Mistakes Author: Elisabeth Yang; Yale School of Management Author: Julia DiBenigno; Yale School of Management Author: Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld; New York U. The Platform is Not Neutral: A Multi-National Comparative Ethnography Author: Lindsey Cameron; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Nicholas Occhiuto; EMLYON Business School Author: Bobbi Thomason; Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Developing or Undermining Expertise in the Shadow of AI? Author: Marjolaine Monique Rostain; Warwick Business School Author: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; Warwick Business School Inclusive Automation Development: Enriching Entry-Level Jobs while Building Automation through a Clo Author: Matt Beane; U. of California, Santa Barbara Author: Erik Brynjolfsson; Stanford U. Author: Dan Sholler; U. of California, Santa Barbara