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AI and automation technologies are being deployed across our economy in a huge variety of sectors from agriculture to restaurants, and from operating theatres to marketing firms.
Headlines commonly suggest huge impacts – both negative, in terms of job losses and positive, in terms of likely productivity gains. But what is really going on on the ground? How are workers experiencing changes to their work when new technologies are adopted, and what can we learn from this to ensure worker, firm and system capabilities align?
For this major new report for the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, Dr Hong Yu Liu spent hundreds of hours interviewing people using AI and automation tools about how it was changing their roles, and what their experiences had been on the quality of their work, and on their wellbeing.
‘This Case Studies report offers great insights into how AI and automation technologies are being adopted in UK firms. Through in-depth interviews with those working across surgery, policing, manufacturing, marketing, charities, and agriculture it adds greatly to our knowledge on how to progress with technology adoption in ways that supports innovation, while sustaining high-quality jobs, skills, and workers’ wellbeing.’ - Nobel Laureate, Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides.
It finds that workers are only rarely losing their jobs to automation, but that the nature of their work is changing significantly, with divergent impacts on different people in different roles. Moreover, when one worker begins using a new technology, the impacts on adjacent workers can be profound – but is not always considered.
Importantly, the productivity gains that are so often promised are not reliably being realised – and this reflects very mixed practices when it comes to management of the adoption process. All of this reinforces the urgent message about the need for proper governance processes around AI and automation, with workers fully engaged in the design, development and deployment of the tools that they are expected to then use. The impacts of reskilling should be part of this assessment process, and care must be taken that adoption doesn’t accidentally make work more routine, less financially rewarding, or give workers less discretion about work.
From surgical robots to welding co-bots, and from algorithmic logistics to LLM's in marketing, these case studies superbly reframe our understanding of what’s really going on in this era of “cognitive” automation. They demonstrate that a focus on job quality, terms and conditions is as - if not far more - important than concerns around access to work, and that improved productivity is not an inevitability but is highly dependent on processes of adoption. - Dr Abigail Gilbert, Co-Director, IFOW
This report complements the work led by Professor James Hayton on the firm-level impacts of AI and automation adoption. A previous release explored findings from a survey of 1000 UK firms, and what the implications were for jobs.
In another workstream led by Professor Jolene Skordis and Dr Magdalena Soffia, research has been conducted into the impacts at the individual worker level, based on a survey of over 5000 UK employees.
Hong Yu Liu and James Hayton
Report
Pissarides Review
