Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a larger part of our lives and is predicted to play a big role in manufacturing industry. The PropAIr project studies proactive organization and work design for AI-integration among manufacturing industry companies. In collaboration between industry and academia, the importance of work design, AI-integration and organizational learning is studied.

Introduction

The purpose with the project is to study manufacturing industry’s proactive organization and changes in work design to integrate AI in their processes. The participating companies are working in parallel with their own AI transformation and the project both supports and follows their development. The goal is to reach insight on how an organization can analyse, understand and develop its own organization and work design for AI integration and what consequences it may bring to the operations.

Insights on the own organisations’ work with organising and work design is important to face the challenges and embrace the possibilities that AI transformation may bring. By regular workshops and co-production research, continuous exchange of knowledge between companies and researches is established, and contributes to further understanding of how organizations can proactively organize and design work processes for AI-integration.

Purpose

To transform an organization into integrating AI can in many ways mean a big adjustment. It is partly about an ongoing and well-known integration of AI in operational processes, and partly about an upcoming development and thus a relatively unknown future. In the project we mainly focus on the future and how organizations can proactively organize and design work processes for AI-integration. This means that we are searching for ways to identify important mechanisms that affects it and how these can be handled. We also see the potential challenges such as organizational learning, work design and proactive organizational change. We believe that taking on AI in an open, systematic and constructive manner is ultimately crucial for the competitiveness for Swedish industries.

Expected results

The purpose of the project is to gain good insights on how an organization can analyze, understand and develop its own proactive organization and work design for AI integration. This could for an instance include strategies for facilitating organizational leaning, to apply socio-technical perspectives on AI integration or ideas about new work processes and roles. The participating companies are working with these issues in real time, but the new knowledge should also be of importance to other companies in Swedish industry. The overarching research purpose is to build knowledge on proactive organization for AI integration in work processes. The goal is to find forms for how work tasks, roles and responsibilities are formed in AI integrated work processes.