This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It's a common refrain that AI is changing how we work, but new research conducted by the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, housed in the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, shows that AI is creating new forms of work and reconfiguring employees' lived experience of work itself. In July 2026, the Lab convened two workshops in collaboration with All Tech Is Human, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing people together to tackle difficult technological questions and advance a technological future aligned with the public interest.
One workshop brought together midlevel professionals tasked with implementing AI on their teams, while the second convening featured senior and executive leaders making decisions about AI adoption across the organization. Both groups were asked a mirrored set of questions to assess their understanding of how AI is reshaping their work or workplace. The findings illuminated disparities in overall views and experiences of AI adoption based on individuals' positions within organizations and their identities and roles beyond the workplace.
These findings, along with key recommendations for organizations looking to support employees in these transitions, are published in a new white paper. "While we continue funding longer-term research on AI's impacts on workers and workplace dynamics, Sara Berger (IBM director of the Lab) and I felt a sense of urgency to understand how people are experiencing these transitions right now," said Megan McDermott, Notre Dame director of the ND-IBM Tech Ethics Lab. "What we learned about things like grief, invisible labor and this fundamental gap between how leaders and workers describe what's going on in their organizations are insights that matter and are important to illuminate in the present moment." With the advent of generative and agentic AI, both cohorts reported that speed and productivity were increasingly becoming the most important values at work, while overall standards were declining and an attitude of "good enough" work was becoming the norm across the organization.
At the same time, workshop attendees reported that rolling out AI across the organization created a new subset of tasks essential to AI transformation, which were often not tracked in formal job descriptions, performance reviews or key organizational metrics. Examples of these hidden tasks include validating and reviewing AI outputs, translating high-level strategy into practice, cross-functional coordination and employee training. Collectively, researchers referred to this as "glue work." Middle managers frequently reported taking on this extra work, with some participants describing new labor as falling disproportionately to women across the organization.
Simultaneously, executive leaders questioned whether AI-enabled organizations would need the middle-management tier in the future while also worrying about "distributed deskilling," the loss of formal and informal avenues where workplace expertise develops, like mentoring, knowledge transfer and training. The workshops exposed a growing tension between the two viewpoints: The skill sets executives feared losing were already being performed, often invisibly, by the middle-management tier whose utility was being questioned. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
"A technology's existence or capabilities doesn't automatically determine what our AI future looks like—that's a convenient but powerful narrative created to offload responsibility," said Berger. "Nothing is decided for us. There are many futures in front of us, as a collective.
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