Guided by the Bot, Driven by the Worker: Task Crafting and Emerging Competencies in GenAI-Augmented Manufacturing

As AI reshapes manufacturing, understanding how workers adapt and develop new competencies is critical. This study offers a grounded, step-by-step model of task crafting in a digitally evolving manufacturing company, highlighting how employees respond to misalignments by redesigning tasks, tools and routines. Based on interviews and observations, the findings reveal a recursive process driven by experiential knowledge, collaboration, and local innovation. Generative AI chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT) augment this process by supporting ideation, automation and informal learning, without displacing human agency. Generative AI supports micro-reskilling and hybrid competencies as a digital companion. This study contributes to job crafting literature by framing competence development as emergent and situated, and to Generative AI-in-manufacturing debates by showing how human-AI collaboration unfolds in practice. It offers implications for workforce transformation strategies aligned with Industry 5.0, where AI and human expertise co-evolve in dynamic, socially embedded ways.