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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. Helping Experts Test Their Theories: How Algorithms Both Rely on and Threaten Occupational Expert Author: Melissa Valentine; Stanford U. Author: Rebecca Hinds; Stanford U. Augmenting or Automating? Breathing Life into the Uncertain Promise of AI Author: Kevin Woojin Lee; U. of British Columbia In Pursuit of Data: The Unanticipated Consequences of Feeding AI Tools Author: Elmira Van Den Broek; Stockholm School of Economics Author: Natalia Levina; New York U. Solve and Be Seen: How Workers in Deskilled Jobs Advance within and Organization Author: Matt Beane; U. of California, Santa Barbara Author: Dan Sholler; U. of California, Santa Barbara Author: Danielle Elaine Bovenberg; U. of California, Santa Barbara AI Tools as Teammates: How Algorithmic Perceptions and Emotions Shape Collective Decision-making Author: Zoe Jonassen; NYU Stern School of Business Author: Katherine C. Kellogg; MIT [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology implementations offer valuable contexts for examining the recursive relationships among institutional forces, organizational structures, and individual practices. Institutional theory provides a useful lens for examining these relationships, but critics note how its most popular concepts underplay the role of agency and portray actors as passive recipients of institutional "scripts." Research on institutional entrepreneurship shows the most promise in addressing these criticisms, but focuses too narrowly on the actions of powerful leaders who have vested interests in changing institutions. In this paper, we argue that other actors also perform work that is critical to institutional change processes, but perhaps lack explicit intentions to change institutions. We provide evidence from the implementation of the Brazilian correspondent banking system, a government-led, information technology-based financial inclusion project. We demonstrates how actors at various levels of the organization ushered in new institutional forms by performing different types of institutional work--administrative, cognitive, and social. Only designers performing administrative work directly aimed to change the institution; however, unintentional institutional work done by actors at lower levels of the organization was equally important to the system's success. We discuss the implications of these findings for future studies of institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]