AI’s Impact on Professional Work to be Examined by CAROW Yang-Tan Incubator Initiative

Much attention has been given to artificial intelligence displacing lower-skilled workers, but less is known about AI’s impact on professional work in high-skill fields, such as legal, finance, journalism and design, according to ILR Professor Sarosh Kuruvilla. 

“Our hypothesis is that jobs at the higher end of the skills spectrum will not go away, but the nature of the work will change, and the relationship between those job holders and their organizations may also change,” Kuruvilla says.

Kuruvilla belongs to a research team that will explore AI’s impact on professional work through a new two-year pilot initiative housed at the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Yang-Tan WorkABILITY Incubator at the ILR School’s Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW). Focusing on the potential for application and impact, the incubator provides seed funds for early-stage research initiatives that show promise in addressing urgent societal challenges related to work, employment and labor.

The initiative, “AI and the New Informality,” will examine the AI-driven “informalization” of typical job protections found in professional employment, such as contracts, collective representation and regulatory visibility. It will also provide concrete tools for how labor organizations and government institutions can respond if these protections begin to erode. 

The initiative’s research team comes from several ILR School departments and consists of Sarosh Kuruvilla, the Andrew J. Nathanson Professor of Industrial Relations; Virginia Doellgast, the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution; and Zoë West, senior research associate at the Worker Institute, as well as ILR Visiting Fellows Maria Mexi of the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and Sarah Krasley, CEO of Shimmy Technologies.

By interviewing professionals in New York and California and in the European cities of Berlin and Geneva, the researchers will learn how similar AI-related circumstances unfold under different labor, regulatory and social-protection systems.

The team will focus on a variety of markers of professional employment, such as contractual status, regulatory visibility and professional recognition and identify how those markers of employment are being gradually eroded, under differing institutional conditions.

“CAROW exists to help ensure research findings about labor and work translate into real-world impact” says Ariel Avgar, CAROW Director and the David M. Cohen Professor of Labor Relations. “We are excited to support this cutting-edge research that will not only identify how AI is affecting an underexplored group of workers but also provide action-oriented recommendations about what stakeholders can do to make sure they have appropriate protections.”

Practical Tools Are Planned

Through collaborations with professional associations, unions, works councils, regulators and others, the researchers plan to use the findings to create two practical tools:

• An AI informalization diagnostic will identify how a job has become less formal and provide a vocabulary for discussing the change.
• A governance playbook will describe techniques – including bargaining clauses, regulatory templates and re-formalization protocols – that can be used by regulators, policymakers and union representatives who aim to restore formal employment protections.

“The purpose is to develop a tool that can be used by employers, employees and other stakeholders to evaluate how jobs are changing as a result of AI and to develop responses to those changes,” Kuruvilla says.

About the WorkABILITY Incubator

The K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan CAROW WorkABILITY Incubator funds and supports innovative research that drives positive change for people who work and has the potential to scale up for greater societal impact beyond the initial pilot. The Incubator is also currently home to the Initiative on Home Care Work, which brings together a community of scholars from Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell Tech, ILR and organizations beyond Cornell to examine the crucial and overlooked homecare workforce in the U.S. 

Another initiative that has been part of the Incubator is the Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative, now housed within the ILR School’s Labor and Employment Law Program. 

CAROW Incubator Initiatives are made possible thanks to generous funding from Lisa Yang ’74 and her vision and enthusiasm for addressing the urgent workplace challenges of our day.