The Impact of Intelligent Technologies on the Future of Work: Challenges and Opportunities for Individuals, Organizations, and Society

Over the last three decades, continuous waves of digitization have significantly transformed traditional ways of organizing and performing work, reshaping routines, norms, and ethics. The proliferation of intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), robots, intelligent chatbots, and other algorithms necessitates a nuanced understanding of their implications for work, professionals, and organizations. Current scholarship has begun to focus on the context-dependent impact of intelligent technologies on work, highlighting the institutional, organizational, and professional level factors affecting this interplay. While institutional and organizational factors facilitate the adoption of intelligent technologies through what Bernhardt and colleagues call the adjustment process, individuals shape the adoption process in the face of imposed work reconfigurations through terrain control contestations. This often results in newly defined professional boundaries, roles, and discretionary jurisdictions. Despite recent scholarship attempting to study and highlight the consequences of intelligent technology-led changes for work and workers, there remains limited systematic understanding of how this change happens. Additionally, the long-term implications of intelligent technologies for work and workers are underexamined.

This research topic aims to examine and develop a critical understanding of how intelligent technologies are reconfiguring work at both the individual and collective level. It aims to explore how these changes can be negotiated and regulated through formal and informal means, thereby advancing the relationship between intelligent technologies and the future of work. We are particularly interested in research that identifies institutional, organizational, and individual-level (macro-meso-micro) factors affecting the deployment, adoption, and appropriation of intelligent technologies by organizations, and their implications for workers. This Research Topic aims to reimagine work in the era of intelligent technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective.

To gather further insights into the boundaries of this research, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Intelligent technologies and macro-meso level transformations and challenges: implications for work reconfiguration, alterations to existing social and technological/material structures, and transformations in service provision and work practices.

- Intelligent technologies and micro-level transformations and challenges: mediation, embrace, or resistance by professionals, including issues such as professional agency, identity, algorithmic management, and decision-making.

- Ethical implications of intelligent technologies: differences from non-intelligent technologies, transformations in the politics of work, and concerns such as the digital divide, transparency, algorithmic bias, responsibility gap, responsible AI, and privacy.

Keywords: work, Intelligent Technologies, artificial intelligence, workers, digitization, organizations, machine learning, natural language processing, robots, ethics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.