Fabienne Perez| PhD Student | Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche en Gestion d’Aix-Marseille (CERGAM)

Image © Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

I  am a PhD student at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche en Gestion d’Aix-Marseille (CERGAM), a research laboratory in IAE Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management, where I am supervised by Prof Olivier Roques.  I am currently a visiting PhD student in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, University of London, under the guidance of Professor Neil Conway, who is an expert in job design.  My research stay in Royal Holloway is facilitated by the Doctoral Program Centre Européen de Formation Approfondie à la Gestion (CEFAG).

The focus of my research is on how AI and learning algorithms transform jobs and workplaces, and how employees respond to these changes. Professor Conway and I are currently analyzing interview data from exploratory research conducted in two very different contexts. The first context is a sample of radiologists who face AI being introduced in the form of deep-learning modules to analyze medical images of detection and predictive diagnosis. The second context is a sample of bank employees’ sales staff who have experienced AI in the form of a commercial recommendation listing based on Machine Learning techniques, with predictive analysis of customer behavior. Preliminary findings reveal contrasting themes across and within employees in both contexts in terms of their perceptions of AI. Some employees considered the AI tool as a threat to their autonomy and tended to anthropomorphize AI, regarding it as a competitor to their jobs; other employees regarded AI as a complementary tool and an opportunity to redesign their working practices. In both cases, employee responses to AI included reframing their jobs to face the changes introduced by AI in order to preserve their work identities.

Being a visiting PhD student is a unique opportunity to have fruitful exchanges with other PhD students, teachers and members of the DOS Research Centre on similar topics in this beautiful and inspiring university.   If you would like to hear more about my research, please do contact me at fabienne.perez@iae-aix.com.