Evaluation of the use of AI technologies in German engineering: insights from the employee perspective

Abstract

AbstractIt is claimed that the technology of Artificial intelligence (AI) will change working life and conditions as we have known until now so drastically that the question arises of how people will work in the future. At least the medial discourse paints these dystopian forecasts (Frey and Osborne in Technol Forecast Soc Change 114:254–80, 2017; Cave and Dihal in Nat Mach Intell 1:74–8, 2019; Susskind and Susskind in The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. 2015) as AI has the potential to automate many processes and address many challenges in the field of engineering (Humpert et al. in Procedia CIRP 119:693–8, 2023). The discussions about the side effects of AI lack the perspective of experts from the field of engineering who provide a differentiated assessment of where the integration of AI could be supportive. An employee perspective is mostly missing in previous research (Giering in Zeitschrift für Arbeitswissenschaft 76:1–15, 2022) but might help identify the areas in labor suitable for integrating AI. To examine where and how AI could be implemented in German engineering this paper summarizes the perspectives of 11 employees from the field of German engineering and their views on AI. The findings focus not on the technical aspect of AI but rather on the employees’ requirements regarding their work. Even though the experts come from similar technical work fields the perspectives, evaluations, and possible application areas regarding AI differ very much. An individual evaluation of employees' perspectives seems crucial for integrating AI into a working environment to design supporting technology. Employees should be seen as co-creators and get the opportunity to co-determine from the beginning of such integration processes (Herrmann and Pfeiffer in AI Soc 38:1523–42, 2023). Furthermore, with this insight, indications about how this career field needs to be formed for future developments can be identified.