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Artificial Intelligence and Management: The Automation-Augmentation Paradox

PublicationArticle (in press)
Artificiell intelligens, Management, Sebastian Krakowski, Sebastian Raisch

Abstract

Taking three recent business books on artificial intelligence (AI) as a starting point, we explore the automation and augmentation concepts in the management domain. Whereas automation implies that machines take over a human task, augmentation means that humans collaborate closely with machines to perform a task. Taking a normative stance, the three books advise organizations to prioritize augmentation, which they relate to superior performance. Using a more comprehensive paradox perspective, we argue that, in the management domain, augmentation cannot be neatly separated from automation. These dual AI applications are interdependent across time and space, creating a paradoxical tension. Over-emphasizing either augmentation or automation fuels reinforcing cycles with negative organizational and societal outcomes. However, if organizations adopt a broader perspective comprising both automation and augmentation, they could deal with the tension and achieve complementarities that benefit business and society. Drawing on our insights, we conclude that management scholars need to be involved in research on the use of AI in organizations. We also argue that a substantial change is required in how AI research is currently conducted in order to develop meaningful theory and to provide practice with sound advice.

Raich, S. & Krakowski, S. (in press). Artificial Intelligence and Management: The Automation-Augmentation Paradox. Academy of Management Review

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Publication year

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Published in

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Empowerment efforts at the workplace are typically divided into two analytical categories: social-structural and psychological empowerment. These have been extensively researched in terms of their application and handling as well as their outcome and general usefulness in human resource management. However, less research has dealt with communicative aspects of empowerment and the communicative interactions between change agents (managers) and recipients (employees) that frame empowerment efforts. To contribute to a more nuanced empowerment discourse, this paper uses a micro-/individual-oriented perspective on empowerment communication and theorizes why empowerment change efforts sometimes end up being counterproductive – leading to disempowerment rather than empowerment. As starting point for theorizing empowerment communication, a “basic communicative structure” is identified and analyzed as comprising a contractual and a communicative context, referring to conditions as outlined in written employment contracts on the one hand, and implicitly shared and understood definitions of the social employment situation on the other. Building on sociological and social-psychological theories of communicative interaction, it is argued that focusing on change agents’ and recipients’ mutual ascriptions of meanings to each other’s communicative messages might improve empowerment outcomes: A communicative analysis of common empowerment efforts suggests that recipients’ sensemaking of their roles and situations as defined by written employment and/or psychological contracts is not necessarily in line with the communicative meanings they ascribe to the change agents’ actions, and vice versa.

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