Artificial intelligence (AI) is causing a major shift in today’s workplace and raising many concerns. Two new grants from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth will fund ILR research aimed at providing insights to policymakers, union leaders, managers and others who are shaping the future of AI in the workplace.

One study will focus on health care workers, and the other will compare different occupations in telecommunications and game development. Each study has its own questions about the relationships between AI and unions, management, and workers, and each takes its own methodological approach.

The project, “Bringing Worker Voice into the Development, Design, and Use of AI: A Case Study of the Labor Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente,” will build on research showing that workers benefit more from AI if they are involved in its design, development and implementation in their workplaces.

The research team, which includes principal investigator Adam Seth Litwin, ILR associate professor, and Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. ’08, ILR’s David M. Cohen ’73 Professor of Labor Relations, as well as Thomas Kochan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, will investigate how to best bring workers and their representatives into AI-infused production and service delivery processes. 

The project, “AI in telecommunications and game development: The role of worker voice in management strategy and job quality,” will compare company strategies to adopt and deploy AI and digital technologies in service and technical occupations. These include call center agents and technicians in telecommunications as well as quality assurance testers and software engineers in game development. 

Virginia Doellgast, the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution, is coordinating the project. Co-investigators are John McCarthy, an associate professor at ILR, and Sean O’Brady, an assistant professor at the DeGroote School of Business. The research team also includes ILR Future of Work Postdoctoral Associate Adam Schoenbachler, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow Jelena Starcevic, and ILR Ph.D. students Jeonghun Kim and Stefan Ivanovski.

Read more on the ILR website. 
Tonya Engst is a writer for the ILR School.