Generative AI and the social fabric of organizations

Abstract

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is provoking intense debate about their potential to boost productivity, stimulate creativity, or disrupt employment. While insightful, these discrete, short-term metrics risk obscuring GenAI’s deeper and longer-term implications for the social fabric of organizations—that is, the ways in which pathways of organizational members interweave in the course of everyday work. In this essay, we identify three sociotechnical characteristics of GenAI use in the workplace—its multipurpose usability, unpredictable plausibility, and hyper-personalizability—and outline how they can reroute the ways employees cross paths, interact, and exchange resources in everyday work. We consider two contrasting scenarios. Under a laissez-faire scenario, GenAI use can disrupt the flows of resources, such as expertise, trust, and collegiality within the organization—in what we refer to as the rise of GenAI “polymaths,” “oracles,” and “sirens” in the workplace. Under a cultivation scenario, by contrast, generative artificial intelligence use is deliberately weaved into the meshwork of everyday work pathways in ways that strengthen, rather than erode, the social fabric that holds the organization together.