Events

Artificial Intelligence and Workforce Skill Development: Examining the Role of Meaning

Speaker: Arvind Karunakaran

Location: Stern College, Room KMC 4-90

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2024

With the increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in organizations, scholars and policymakers alike have emphasized the need for worker reskilling to reduce exacerbating societal inequalities in the wake of such radical technological changes. While existing research has largely focused on factors such as task structure of jobs and organizational redesign, the psychological mechanisms influencing workers’ motivation to learn new skills are unclear. In this article, we address this issue by examining the psychological factors driving workers’ reskilling motivation amid AI-driven changes. To do so, we use a multi-method approach that involves qualitative interviews, preregistered lab experiments, and comparative ethnography. We unpack how and why AI use impacts workers’ sense of meaning and motivation to reskill across various job roles (Study 1), establish a causal link between AI use, work meaningfulness, and reskilling motivation with experimental studies (Studies 2-3), and find that managerial framing of AI plays a crucial role, with productivity-focused framing reducing work meaningfulness and reskilling motivation, while job enrichment framing enhancing them (Study 4). Together, these studies emphasize the role of meaning in driving the impact of AI on reskilling motivation. We discuss implications for research on technology and skill development, meaning of work, and AI deployment. Our work also has important societal implications, underscoring how organizations can create AI-integrated work environments that balance automation with meaningful work and help create shared prosperity for the future workforce through practices that reskill and empower workers in an AI-augmented environment.