The Fury Beneath The Agent

Artificial intelligence as augmenting automation: Implications for employment

“AI helps automation to become self-governing”

“Our goal was to better inform the replacement and augmentation debate by examining it from the broader perspective of AI’s augmentation of automation. While in prior eras of automation the loss of employment to automation was offset by the growth of new sectors and jobs, this also involved a loss of routinized, middle-skilled work, and a polarization of jobs into high- and low-skilled ones. In an era of AI-augmented automation, we suggest that this imbalance may be further aggravated. We examined digitally transformed firms and developments in AI to help articulate an argument for the further replacement of work. Essentially, AI helps automation to become self-governing, even while a broader automation of firms’ work processes occurs. Firms can more easily replace modularized work, and the modularizing of nonroutine work makes them more tractable (and solvable) as new AI problems. Furthermore, given that the remaining manual work essentially involves basic cognitive functions such as pattern recognition or manual dexterity, this eliminates any wage premium accruable from training, and might be considered a form of deskilling. These trends may bode poorly for employment.”

Tschang, F. T., & Almirall, E. (2021). Artificial intelligence as augmenting automation: Implications for employment. Academy of Management Perspectives, 35(4), 642-659.

CEO attentional vigilance: Behavioral implications for the pursuit of exploration

There’s a lot more signal in earnings calls

“I theorize that CEO attention is beneficial for the pursuit of exploration when it is stably maintained over time and is used to protect the integrity of explorative activities. To corroborate this theory, I test Hypothesis 2, that the effect of CEO attention vigilance on exploration is more pronounced as a firm’s financial performance falls below aspiration levels. Moreover, Hypothesis 3 testing reveals that employee satisfaction in explorative units partially mediates the effect of CEO attentional vigilance on exploration.”

Rhee, L. (2024). CEO attentional vigilance: Behavioral implications for the pursuit of exploration. Academy of Management Journal, (ja), amj-2022.

The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing

Re-org the org, re-org the blame

“Our study lifts a veil on how leaders who champion novel organizational features might be seeking cover, more- or less-consciously, from a foreboding of personal failure. When that happens, our theory argues, failure becomes more likely. Defensive organizing distracts leaders and members from the organization’s problems, becoming a problem itself.”

Fitzsimons, D., Petriglieri, J. L., & Petriglieri, G. (2024). The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing. Academy of Management Journal, (ja), amj-2023.

Reader Feedback

“If AI is making the creating more creative, what is it doing to the least creative?”

“Complexity certainly ramps mistakes. Could an agent ask about our true risk preferences and help us make fewer mistakes?”

Footnotes

I’m increasingly convinced that many of the anxieties presented by new, generative and agentic AI, are nearly identical to the anxieties experienced by those confronting AI classic: recsys, narrow ML, and predictive analytics. What seems to be different is the amplitude of those anxieties. How useful is the anxiety relative to the technology?

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