With the rapid development in technologies in recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually making an appearance in the workplace. Although researchers from multiple disciplines have started to pay more attention to AI, they tend to focus on the technical aspects and ethical issues of the application, leaving employees’ adaptive attitudes and behaviours not fully addressed. As direct users and collaborators, employees’ adaptive attitudes and behaviours are crucial for organisations to gain sustainable benefits from AI applications to meet important organisational goals. As such, there is a strong desire from organisations to understand how employees perceive AI and how to promote their adaptive attitudes and behaviours. The purpose of this study is to examine the potential influence of AI on employees from two aspects—employees’ perceptions toward AI and their perception towards jobs post AI adoption.

We plan to validate the AI function measurement and test the relationships between AI functions and AI perceptions/job characteristics in our study. To enhance causal interpretations, we will conduct an experiment where we will manipulate the different AI functions and evaluate participants’ perceptions toward AI, job characteristics and work outcomes after experiment. Finally, we test the full theoretical model using employees from organisations that have adopted AI. Our study will address the critical issue regarding the workforce reactions toward AI applications by examining employees’ psychological responses to AI and to their jobs. Our study underlines that AI’s impact may differ depending on its functions. We also caution against conceptualising AI in a widely-used and oversimplified manner without considering its different functions.

The study is a collaboration with Associate Professor Chi Wei from Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, and is funded by a grant from Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation.