It all comes back to: What are you holding on to? What do you let go of and what do you lean into? Dr. Britta Fiore-Gartland and Dr. Mark Hoffman converged on the topic of sociotechnical shifts as part of EPIC’s Learning Week in the session “How Is AI Integration Transforming Organizations? New Opportunities for Ethnography, Research, and Strategy”. From Dr. Hoffman’s discussion of why two-thirds of companies fail to scale AI use internally to Dr. Fiore-Gartland’s hierarchy of needs diagram layering how organizations build trust in AI, the conversation encouraged researchers to take a critical lens to shifts in our ways of working and the future of work within organizations.

We must begin our approach to AI adoption in organizations with shifting our context of use from the individual to a collaborative practice. “AI is a team sport… but we fail to support that in meaningful ways,” Dr. Fiore-Gartland explained during the Learning Week session. Temporary AI evaluation teams lack deeply embedded structures that support AI adoption across organizations. Dr. Hoffman reminded attendees that part of the reason AI technologies fail to deliver their promise to radically shift our ways of working is because work is deeply social.

When we remember the culture of work is deeply social, we understand that AI adoption within an organization becomes a practice of change management. The moment organizations shift to a change management lens for AI uptake, they begin to lay meaningful groundwork that supports adoption at scale. Central to this process is detailing a purpose that explains why our relationship with AI exists, then creating a mission that outlines action-items for realizing this purpose. Start with defining the problem AI solves, who experiences it, in which contexts it appears, why it’s worth solving, and the risks of not addressing it. This sets a clear vision of an imagined future that outlines how organizations might strengthen and evolve in concrete and measurable ways.

As AI adoption scales, organizations’ success definitions mature beyond solely business outcomes and move towards measuring the return-on-investment of human-centered levers that influence business outcomes~ beyond productivity and efficiency and into measurements of innovation, creativity, employee engagement and a sense of meaning. How people experience change emotionally is also critical. Change is both an event and a process. As people accept the loss of the old to make room for the new, mindset shifts lead to behavioral change. Successful AI integration in organizations requires remembering that although technology is growing and changing incredibly fast, we are still people who process and change slowly.

EPIC Learning Week is our annual learning and career development event for EPIC Members. EPIC Members can participate in virtual EPIC events and watch premium video in the EPIC Library – including Learning Week, our annual conference, and selected Tutorials.

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