Mohammad Jarrahi | Shaping the Future of Work: A Sociotechnical Vision of Human-AI Symbiosis
AlgoWork Roundtable
2025/02/26 15:00-16:00
Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on understanding the consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) for work, drawing on the sociotechnical perspective to examine the interplay between technology, people, and organizational contexts.
I would like to discuss my previous work on the concept of human-AI symbiosis as an organizing vision and clarify how it may require a sociotechnical understanding of AI and organization. I will then highlight several calls to action for researchers:
1) Contextualize AI's affordances and constraints based on grounded and holistic studies of work and AI,
2) Focus on units of analysis such as AI assemblages and human-AI hybrids, capturing the engagement of AI and humans as well as other organizational and contextual dynamics,
3) Integrate human agency, particularly users, in shaping algorithmic outcomes,
4) Incorporate AI agency and its design mindset implications in theorizing about organizations,
5) Move beyond the automation and augmentation narrative to deeply explore the bidirectional relationship between humans and AI as partners in organizations.
