The workshop “AI and the Future of Work: Organizational Challenges and Human Perspectives”, held by the AI for Sustainability Institute of ESSCA School of Management, aims to explore new challenges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and generative AI (gen AI) in particular brings into the workplace.

With the rising use of AI, organizations are undergoing a profound technological transformation. According to Cristofaro and Giardino (2025), the mid-2020s mark  a “paradigm shift toward human–AI collaboration and integrating AI technologies into complex decision-making processes (Rabunal et al., 2009; Felt and Irwin, 2024).” This new paradigm gives rise to several questions, particularly in relation to organizational performance and human resources management. Research on AI and work alternates between emphasizing augmentation and value creation, on the one hand, and documenting resistance, threat, and unintended harm, on the other, revealing unresolved tensions that this call seeks to address.

On the optimistic side, scholars show that well-designed AI-employee collaboration can enhance business performance, dynamic capabilities, and innovation (Füller et al., 2024), especially when supported by knowledge sharing, appropriate skills, and socialization practices that enable “collaborative intelligence” in hybrid human-AI workforces (Chowdhury et al., 2022). Moreover, human-AI collaboration enables to solve unexplored and complex problems (Raisch, & Fomina, 2025).

On the pessimistic side, integrative reviews stress that employees frequently experience AI not as a neutral efficiency tool but as a source of fear (Kertechian, 2025), feelings of reduced self-efficacy, and antipathy (Yam et al., 2022), giving rise to a distinct form of “AI resistance” (Golgeci et al., 2025). These tensions are amplified by evidence that collaboration with AI can undermine core psychosocial mechanisms at work, for instance by lowering impression management concerns and, in turn, diminishing organizational citizenship behavior (Bai & Zhang, 2025). The literature also questions the relevance and effectiveness of human-AI collaboration, as algorithms lack essential features of human interaction, such as mutual understanding and shared goals (Shah & Tamine, 2026) and because humans alone sometimes outperform human-AI combinations (Vaccaro et al., 2024).

Reviews and conceptual frameworks call for human-centered acceptance models (Del Giudice et al., 2023), multilevel perspectives (Bankins et al., 2024), and attention to hybrid human-AI problem-solving (Raisch, & Fomina, 2025) to better understand how design choices around accessibility, anthropomorphism, augmentation, and legitimation shape employees’ experiences of trust, meaning, and control at work. Empirical studies further suggest that AI can reduce repetitive burdens yet simultaneously provoke job insecurity (Ghosh et al., 2024; Kertechian, 2025), spite toward algorithmic or robotic supervisors, and subtle forms of deviance or withdrawal, These developments raiseunresolved questions about power, ethics, and governance in AI-mediated work systems, that are further tackled by emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AU Act

We therefore invite contributions that unpack these contradictions, clarify boundary conditions and mechanisms to better understand AI within organizations.

The workshop is open to all topics related to AI issues in the workplace, including but not limited to the themes outlined above, and welcomes diverse theoretical perspectives, methods, and disciplinary backgrounds.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submissions must be original and may be written in either French or English.
Use the submission form below to send an abstract of 1000-1500 words.

DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: MONDAY 31 AUGUST 2026.

Authors will be notified of the review outcomes by October 5, 2026.

There are no registration fees for this workshop. Venue, lunch and coffee breaks will be covered by ESSCA.