From Heron of Alexandria to Amazon’s Alexa: a stylized history of AI and its impact on business models, organization and work

Abstract

This paper explores the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on business models, organization and work. First, we provide a stylized history of AI highlighting the technological, organizational and market-related factors fostering its diffusion and transformative potential. We show how AI evolved from being a scientific field to a mostly corporate-dominated field characterized by strong concentration of technological and economic power. Second, we analyze the consequences of AI adoption for business models, organization and work. Our discussion contributes to show how the development and diffusion of this technological domain gives new strength to the lean-production paradigm - in both manufacturing and service sectors - by contributing to the establishment of the new ‘digital Taylorism’.