Abstract
With the increasing development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the nature of work across today’s organizations has been fundamentally changing. One central area of concern has revolved around what the rationalization of work through AI technologies might portend for work’s humanness: a conceptually vague, if evocative and deeply meaningful, dimension of our sense of distinctiveness as a species. To explore how AI will impact the “humanness of work,” and given that so much of the existing discourse on AI has been “largely speculative”, we gathered a set of empirical studies that have gone out into this new world of work and observed what has been happening across today’s workplaces. The insights illustrate that on one hand, AI can threaten work’s humanness, as embodied in workers’ expertise, the “soulness” of their emotive expressive work, and the “human touch” that they add to how organizations select their human capital. On the other hand, automation and algorithms have the potential to enrich work’s humanness. Through discussing these findings as part of the symposium, we aim to derive both theoretical and practical insights on how AI can be leveraged to put human needs at the center and contribute to creating both a sustainable and effective work environment.