IU – International University of Applied Sciences, Germany
We report on a 16-month ethnographic field study of a German software development company building its first AI-based software product, a smart assistant tool for HR queries. Through inductive analysis, we develop a new process theory that conceptualizes AI development as a composite teleological and dialectical process during which an initial and exogenous “given sense” of the solution and problem space of AI technology is gradually replaced with a new and recursively formed socially constructed “sense” that becomes enacted in the materialized AI product. This sensemaking process is constituted through dialectical actions of sense hiding and sense specification that unfold in different iterative stages, which gradually but not linearly concretize an abstract sense of wat AI is. Our new theory offers new perspectives on the differences between AI development and traditional software development and provides several implications for how firms can better manage emerging equivocal, general purpose technologies in the future.
