AI’s impact on business has been well studied by researchers. Language models, smart buildings, ergonomics, automation, and robotics are topics of countless studies that show how technology is changing the American workplace. 

But what will the impact be on office and clerical workers? According to a researcher at the Tippie College of Business, we don’t really know.

Beth Livingston, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship, recently looked at hundreds of published papers, conference presentations, and other research published in recent decades looking for studies about the impact of technology on office and clerical workers. 

“We don’t often think about artificial intelligence and clerical work, the kind of filing and collating and administrative jobs that have been traditionally lower paying jobs held by women,” said Livingston. “We want to understand the challenges these workers will have and learn about what they will need to do to adapt.”

But she found few studies with little data. There was a bump in the 1980s, when researchers studied the impact of desktop computers taking over the workplace. And another during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they studied the impact of remote work arrangements. 

For the most part, though, she rarely found more than a handful of studies about the impact of AI on office and clerical workers in any given year.

“We know very little about how technology affects the day-to-day work lives of clerical workers,” she said. 

But she said it’s important to understand the impact because many of those jobs are the entry point to careers for people who don’t have college degrees or other credentials that have become, in many cases, key to career success. Learning more about how that work will be affected by technology is vital to keeping those doors open.

She said researchers and consultants often have blind spots about how technology will impact workers, especially lower paid workers like secretaries, administrative assistants, or clerks. People get excited about the impact of technology, she said, but they don’t often look at the bigger picture. 

“It’s good to be excited about the technology, but it’s important to take a critical view of how it will improve work,” she said. “Instead of inventing technology to solve a problem, we invent the technology and then go in search of a problem. We need to ask ourselves, is this an opportunity or a threat.”

Livingston’s review of the studies, “The future of office and administrative support occupations in the era of artificial intelligence,” was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and published in the International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics. 

Media contact: Tom Snee, 319-384-0010 (o); 319-541-8434 (c); tom-snee@uiowa.edu