Finalist for the OMT Division Responsible Research Award
Artificial intelligence (AI) is characterized by high expectations regarding its impact on the future of work. While extant research has explained how workers react to AI systems that do not serve their interests, e.g., through gaming or workarounds, we need a better understanding of how they respond to the long-term potentiality of AI. Our study deploys a futures perspective to expand our knowledge of how promissory technologies such as AI come into being in organizations. We explore this through a study of worker representatives in Germany. Our findings map out the possibility space of AI, that is, AI’s positive and negative futurescapes given its two future-oriented dimensions of expected relevance and uncertainty. Within this possibility space, futures are shaped through the four future-shaping activities of building capacity, shaping narratives, experimenting, and setting guardrails. We contribute to the literature on worker responses to AI by showing that workers’ responses to AI are acts of engaging with and negotiating organizational futures. Further, we contribute to the literature at the intersection of organizations and futures by evidencing how desirable futures are enabled and undesirable futures are mitigated through interconnected future-shaping activities.
