Embedding Artificial Intelligence At Work: From Efficiency Gains To Leadership Expertise
With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) applications at the workplace, the debate about the future of work, workers, and the workplace has intensified. The polarised nature of debate ranges from job losses versus new-technology job creation through performance efficiency versus performance effectiveness to liberating humans from drudgery versus being controlled by machines. While several other polarities are evident in this debate, the truth always lies somewhere in between. In addition, there are other dark-side debates in the field about ethical, legal, and moral issues in the design and implementation of AI technologies for work and society.
While popular discourse presents AI as a new phenomenon, the development of AI as an academic discipline dates back to 1956. Since then, the computational power has increased exponentially, and various new AI technologies have been developed for delivering a range of social, business, and workplace applications. The rise of expert systems in the 1980s, followed by the increasing integration of various knowledge-based systems, saw the growing adoption of intelligent agents for a range of activities. The foundational efforts employing multidisciplinary lenses from maths, science, psychology, and economics led to increased use of machine learning, deep learning, and big data, and artificial general intelligence to develop a range of developments in AI-enabled applications for the workplace.
Extending the multidisciplinary nature of his research on analyzing the performance of systems, teams, and individuals, Associate Professor Ashish Malik, Head of the Management Discipline at the University of Newcastle, Australia, teamed up with Professor Pawan Budhwar, as part of an International Research Collaboration Grant between the two Universities. They examined various impacts of AI at the workplace, focusing on how AI technologies and applications are being employed in the study and practice of Human Resource Management (HRM) and Employment Relations. Kickstarting scholarship on this crucial topic, Professors Budhwar and Malik are editing two Special Issues in the International Journal of Human Resource Management and Human Resource Management Review on AI and HRM.
Professor Pawan Budhwar is the 50th Anniversary Professor of International HRM, Head of Aston Business School, and an Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor International (India) at Aston University, UK. He is also the Joint Director of Aston India Centre for Applied Research and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Human Resource Management Journal. He received his doctorate from Manchester Business School and is globally known for his research in the fields of strategic and international HRM and emerging markets, with a specific focus on India. He has published over 150 articles in leading journals and has also written and co-edited over 25 books.
Pawan is the co-founder and first President of the Indian Academy of Management, an affiliate of the Academy of Management. He has served as an advisor to the Commonwealth Commission for six years, as co-editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Management for seven years (2014-2020), and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, British Academy of Management, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Indian Academy of Management. He has won numerous awards for his research.
Associate Professor Ashish Malik has authored nine scholarly books on various aspects of HRM and culture in knowledge-intensive and high-technology multinational enterprises from emerging and developed nations.
