Within the AI@Work research group, we study how AI becomes part of work and organizing: how it is developed, interpreted, adapted, worked around, and sometimes resisted. Ethics and governance questions run through all of this: whose values count, what oversight looks like, what explainability entails, and who is responsible when things go wrong.
The AI Ethics@Work Lab takes these questions as its focus. We study how ethics and governance are practiced inside organizations, not just how they are supposed to work on paper. Values such as fairness, autonomy, and explainability do not simply get implemented; they are enacted in routines, meetings, tools, and workarounds, and shift as those practices, technologies, and social relations evolve. Beyond the increasingly available AI ethics principles and guidelines, technological tools (fairness metrics, explainable AI), and compliance checklists, our work centres on how organizations can organize for ethics and governance in everyday practices. This organizing involves embedding AI ethical values in organizational life, sustaining effective governance around a fast evolving and opaque technology, and navigating regulation such as the EU AI Act. As part of the AI@Work research group, we are interested in how organizations cultivate a culture in which workers critically question AI at work and its (un)intended consequences, and advance its responsible development and use in society more broadly.
