Artificial Intelligence, Bureaucratic Dehumanization, and the Organizational Ombuds

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) systems have made extraordinary leaps in advancement in recent years. Organizations of all kinds are integrating AI into their systems at an unprecedented rate, seeking to acquire the benefits of efficiency, information sharing, and rational decision‐making AI seems to promise. Within these organizations, organizational ombuds must consider their function to determine how and to what extent AI offers benefits and risks. Applying a Weberian lens, this article takes as a foundational assumption the view that organizational ombuds function as bureaucratic “humanizers” within complex organizations, helping organizations resist depersonalization by helping individuals navigate the tension between bureaucratic optimization and individualized problem‐solving. Because the organizational ombuds is a humanizing role within a bureaucratic system, artificial intelligence will be beneficial or detrimental to the profession insofar as it furthers or detracts from that function. Consequently, ombuds must understand both the humanizing and dehumanizing potential of AI for our organizations in order to meet the challenges it poses. AI has immense potential to improve bureaucratic functioning but is also inherently dehumanizing and as such may tend to further bureaucratic dehumanization. Organizational ombuds must understand this dynamic even as they seek to adopt AI for themselves to increase capacities and reach within their organizations. The risk of AI to intensify bureaucratic dehumanization also argues for the necessity of organizational ombuds to remain independent of any AI system.