Twenty-fourth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest for emerging artificial intelligent (AI) technologies in organization theory, emphasizing ethical and societal challenges of computerizing of human work. However, how AI disrupts existing organizational routines and creates new ones has received little attention. This paper argues for a need for a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding how organizations can innovate with AI to overcome ethical and societal challenges, and contributes to this by discussing findings from a longitudinal case study of temporal work with AI. The notion of temporal work is based on the influential contribution by Kaplan and Orlikowski, which shows how the organizational actors are guided by temporal assumptions of the past, the present and the future. The case study brings to the field rich data of temporal assumptions collected over time in an organization considering using AI. The selected organization provides an interesting setting to study temporal work of AI given its pioneering role as the first public organization in Norway that launched a strategy for AI in 2015, and that established an innovation lab of data scientists in 2017. Still, the organization has not launched any “real” AI-product by 2023. The findings show that the use of AI depends on several organizational processes involving temporal assumptions of threats and capacities of AI. Moreover, these temporal assumptions are co-constructed in organizational and technological shifts. The organizational interests for AI change in correspondence with technological shifts, but also with the temporality of work, in existing experiences and beliefs of AI.