From digital transformation to digital lock-in: How the material needs of AI enable and constrain strategy

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Time, Technology, and Capitalism (CIRTTC) and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) working group "Algorithmic Technology and Society" (AT&S) are inviting you to a participatory research workshop with Meaghan J. Girard.

Workshop description:
Despite extensive research finding evidence for the digital affordances of AI leading to opportunities for innovation, investments in AI do not necessarily translate to strategic gains for organizations. To shed light on this disconnect, Dr. Girard draws on a path-centric, relational view of affordances to ask the following question: How do the material and social dimensions of AI enable and constrain technological strategy over time? To answer this question, she studies how a professional services firm strategized four AI technologies over a 12-year period, which included two periods of AI hype, while drawing on 54 semi-structured interviews, 71 participant and non-participant observations, and 200 blog posts. Dr. Girard finds 31 strategic moments over five phases during which the firm engages with AI technologies, and decides whether to escalate or constrain their commitment to AI. She finds that once the firm makes its first material commitment to AI, the AI becomes increasingly entangled into the organization and expresses growing material needs—which become amplified in periods of hype—initiating a contest between material and social agencies. This study challenges this notion of material agency, and instead redefines material agency in terms of need, one that is met in part through external hype. It also challenges our conceptualization of AI as having affordances for seemingly endless generativity, and instead shows that past a certain point, the possibilities of action become reduced in a way to prioritize ‘feeding’ the AI. By showing, in such granular detail over time, how the social and material aspects of AI work together to push its entanglement with a host organization, this work also sheds light on the apparent disconnect between the innovation potential of digital technologies and positive organizational outcomes, and shows the importance of organizations considering the long-term entanglement effects of AI when implementing technological strategies.

About the speaker: Meaghan Girard is an Assistant Professor in Language Technologies in the Department of French Studies. As an organizational ethnographer, she studies how people learn, work, and strategize during digital transformations. As an educator, she is passionate about helping students meet this moment in history - and this moment calls for strong foundations in AI literacy and ethics. She translates her findings into classrooms by creating structured spaces where her students can experiment with AI in critical, transparent, and effective ways, and for practitioners by helping them recognize and leverage their own deep, situated expertise.

Registration is free; please confirm your interest to help us plan accordingly.