Artificial Intelligence Being Embedded at the Workplace

The debate over the future of work, workers, and the Workplace has intensified as artificial intelligence (AI) applications become more widely used. The polarised character of the discussion varies from job losses vs. new-technology job growth, performance efficiency versus performance effectiveness, and human liberation versus machine control. While there are countless different poles in this discussion, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.

There are also some shady discussions about ethical, legal, and moral considerations in designing and applying AI technology for labor and society. While AI is portrayed as a new phenomenon in popular culture, it has been studied as an academic field since 1956. Since then, computational power has skyrocketed, and a slew of new AI technologies have emerged to deliver a variety of social, corporate, and Workplace applications.

Intelligent agents have been increasingly used for various tasks since the advent of expert systems in the 1980s, followed by the increasing integration of diverse knowledge-based systems. The fundamental initiatives, which used multidisciplinary lenses from math, science, psychology, and economics, resulted in expanded usage of machine learning, deep learning, big data, and artificial general intelligence to produce a variety of AI-enabled Workplace applications.

Associate Professor Ashish Malik, Head of the Management Discipline at the University of Newcastle in Australia, collaborated with Professor Pawan Budhwar as part of an International Research Collaboration Grant between the two universities to extend the multidisciplinary nature of his research on analyzing the performance of systems, teams, and individuals.