From playmate to assistant; User experiences of integrating ChatGPT into knowledge work

While Generative AI is believed to impact societies, organizations, and work, little is known about how ChatGPT is experienced by early users and its impact on their work practices for knowledge work. This is concerning as ChatGPT is exactly the opposite of many of the technological systems studied before - it is decentralized (from an organizational perspective), multipurpose, and open-ended, and it is more autonomous by creating new syntactic content. Building on an explorative interview study with 31 early adopters, we identified different use types for ChatGPT. Thereupon, we theorize a phase model of experiencing Generative AI use as an emotional process. The exploratory insights challenge the information systems field to rethink the passive role of technology to which ‘users’ delegate subtasks toward a collaborative role with AI as a teammate or colleague. Finally, we observe worker-system intertwinement, and we discuss its potential consequences on the level of the individual, organization, and even society

What Are We Augmenting? A Multidisciplinary Analysis of AI-based Augmentation for the Future of Work.

While augmentation is commonly presented as a desirable path in AI development and implementation, we have not yet found a shared definition for this concept. As the verb “to augment” needs to be followed by a target, we raise the question: What is augmented with AI? Building on a literature review of the augmentation narratives in five different disciplines – i.e., labor economics, computer science, philosophy, management, and information systems – we identify eleven distinct augmentation perspectives taken by scholars of those fields, including the underlying theoretical concepts that indicate what is intended to be augmented. This paper contributes to theory by “going beyond augmentation as collaboration” and helping us to move “towards collaboration for augmentation”

Digitizing crime:How the use of predictive policing influences police work practices

This paper reports on an ongoing ethnographic study on knowledge production through the use of analytics in police work. Based on an analysis of work practices of so-called “intelligence officers” and police action, we show that there is an important role for intermediaries – those who are in-between designers and users – who make analytics actionable. We find that the work of intermediaries includes three contextualizing practices: (1) validating, (2) filtering, and (3) supplementing. These practices are deemed necessary by both intelligence and police officers, as they give a richer and more concrete explanation to algorithmic outputs and create actionable knowledge. At the same time, these practices shape what knowledge is considered useful and which contextual factors will be taken into account

Losing Touch:An embodiment perspective on coordination in robotic surgery

Because new technologies allow new performances, mediations, representations, and information flows, they are often associated with changes in how coordination is achieved. Current coordination research emphasizes its situated and emergent nature, but seldom accounts for the role of embodied action. Building on a 25-month field study of the da Vinci robot, an endoscopic system for minimally invasive surgery, we bring to the fore the role of the body in how coordination was reconfigured in response to a change in technological mediation. Using the robot, surgeons experienced both an augmentation and a reduction of what they can do with their bodies in terms of haptic, visual, and auditory perception and manipulative dexterity. These bodily augmentations and reductions affected joint task performance and led to coordinative adaptations (e.g., spatial relocating, redistributing tasks, accommodating novel perceptual dependencies, and mounting novel responses) that, over time, resulted in reconfiguration of roles, including expanded occupational knowledge, emergence of new specializations, and shifts in status and boundaries. By emphasizing the importance of the body in coordination, this paper suggests that an embodiment perspective is important for explaining how and why coordination evolves following the introduction of a new technology

Playing the Numbers Game: Dealing with Transparency

This paper unpacks the performativity of transparency inside the organization. Organizational members often use digital technologies to make their actions visible to others in the organization. However, practices of visibility produce opaqueness as much as transparency. In our qualitative study in a telecommunications organization, organizational members sometimes made their actions transparent to their colleagues and managers, while at other times they played numbers games and made their actions opaque. We take a sociomaterial perspective and investigate how practices of visibility are performed by organizational members while using digital technologies. We consider the temporality of visibility making practices, to better understand how they emerge and how they produce transparency and opaqueness. We illustrate how transparency and opaqueness are produced interchangeably, as actors are oriented towards the past, present, or future. The study extends our understanding of information visibility inside organizations, by bringing to the foreground its sociomaterial and temporal nature

Hiring Algorithms: An Ethnography of Fairness in Practice

While increasing attention in society is given to the role of AI in affording and threatening ethical values, such as fairness, little is known about how ethical values and AI are played out in organizations. Building on an ethnographic in-depth study of a large multinational company that recently implemented AI to enable a fair recruitment process, we show that AI brings to the fore the role of fairness in decision-making in several ways. We reveal that the development and use of AI does not necessarily improve nor degrade ethical values, but instead shapes what comes to be understood as ethical in the first place. We extend the conversations on AI by showing that it may not be enough to focus on changes in work practices, occupational boundaries, and power relations, but that research should take into account the role of AI in shaping what we consider ethical