The increasing use of AI tools in the workplace means more tasks will be automated, with many white-collar jobs seemingly poised to take the hit. What remains to be seen is how workers plan to respond to the potential threat of these new technologies.
“What do students and workers naturally gravitate towards when they feel like their future work is at risk?” asks Monica Gamez-Djokic, who completed a postdoc at Kellogg and is now at Purdue University. Gamez-Djokic, along with Maryam Kouchaki and Adam Waytz, both professors of management and organizations at Kellogg, set out to address that question in a series of studies.
Specifically, the researchers sought to explore what skills and employment opportunities people might prioritize in a more-automated world. They found that when people perceive automation and AI as threats, they strategically shift toward prioritizing creativity in their careers.
That effect was consistent across a range of work-related scenarios.
“People highlight creative skills in job applications, they choose more-creative training in terms of additional education or courses, and they also appear to prefer employers that have a creative culture, rather than an analytical one,” Gamez-Djokic says. “These technologies change how people try to signal their value in the workplace.”
“Creativity is really that sweet spot,” Kouchaki adds. “People feel it will be useful in a world of automation and AI and also that it is less replaceable by these technologies.”
Betting on creativity
The researchers began by exploring how people thought the growing presence of automation, robotics, and AI would affect work-related skills. They looked at technical skills (such as data analysis and programming), social skills (such as negotiation and communication), and creative skills that emphasize the creation of new and useful ideas (such as innovation and imagination).
In a pilot study of 194 participants, most believed that automation is more likely to replace basic technical skills than creative skills and that automation would increase the importance of tasks that require creative skills.
Then the researchers investigated how people might respond to job threats posed by new technology.
In one study, 295 participants were asked to imagine themselves as recent college graduates and to read information about labor-market trends. Half read about competing with immigrants and foreign workers for jobs, while the other half read about competing with AI and automation. Then they were asked to choose 3 skills from a list of 12 that they would highlight in a cover letter. Participants who read about the threat of automation prioritized creative skills more than those who read about the threat of foreign labor did.
A follow-up study confirmed that individuals who were exposed to information about automation tended to highlight more-creative skills, even when they did not have a premade list of skills to reference.
“Creativity is really that sweet spot. People feel it will be useful in a world of automation and AI and also that it is less replaceable by these technologies.”
Maryam Kouchaki
The researchers also wanted to see how people might adapt their skills to a more-automated world. In a pair of experiments, they found that college students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields and graphic designers—both of whom read about potentially having to compete with AI and automation—were more inclined to want additional education in creative rather than technical skills.
“When you start to pit all these skills against each other and ask people to choose between them, which they often have to do with limited time or resources, then they focus on creativity,” Gamez-Djokic says. “That seems to be the best bet.”
Distinctly human?
But these studies were conducted before the general public became much more aware of the creative potential of large-language models like ChatGPT in late 2022.
So the researchers conducted two additional experiments in 2023 to see how the rise in popularity of generative AI might have changed people’s perceptions. They found that, even after giving participants additional information about generative AI’s ability to produce creative content, people still preferred to highlight creative skills in their job applications and LinkedIn profiles.
While the findings point to the importance of creative skills, they don’t necessarily reflect what will actually happen in the workplace—just what people think will happen and how those beliefs might change people’s behavior.
