AI sensemaking and adaptation through knowledge workers' career transition narratives

With advancing capabilities exhibited by generative AI systems, there have been many competing narratives about the occupational implications that they hold for knowledge workers – those whose work is composed primarily of cognitive labor. This study takes seriously the potential transformative impact this technology might hold for this group of workers. It contributes to existing discourse about how these workers attempt to make sense of an inscrutable technology and, crucially, to adapt. While recent studies have begun to explore how workers themselves are making sense of AI and its implications for their work lives, fewer have examined what actions, particularly career-related actions, workers might enact in response to AI’s growing integration in the workplace. Lacking this worker-focused understanding of their adaptation to this emergent technological moment means that we are less equipped to support those bridging this transition, especially those most vulnerable to its disruptive impact. Taking this action-oriented focus, this study centers its investigation on career transitioners, that is, knowledge workers who occupy an in-between state of change as they undergo career changes that are informed by AI developments in their work environments. A qualitative method was adopted to understand role transitioners’ sensemaking process. In total, 51 semi-structured interviews were analyzed to tease out the set of exit and entry roles that transitioners navigated, and how AI factored into their sensemaking and career adaptation process. The AI sensemaking process model presented in the findings elicited a common set of cues, triggers, frames, strategies, and activities that these individuals engaged to develop a mental model of AI. This sensemaking model enables an understanding of how the technical properties of AI and workplace conditions may shape the threat and opportunity orientations workers adopt towards this technology, and subsequently drive their career adaptation strategies. The sensemaking perspective reveals both the processes workers use and the challenges they face in developing a mental model of an inscrutable technology—mental models that increasingly inform high-stakes career decisions.