Leadership work in public AI-projects between technological hope and organizational realization

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings promises of alleviating many of the problems the public sector has been confronted with for decades. AI is often perceived as a turn-key and stable “thing”, ready to be implemented in organizations when these decide to do so. Observing an AI-project from a Communication as Constitutive perspective, AI appears as a sociomaterially inter-woven and situated phenomenon changing over time. We can thus pose the question as to which forms of situated leadership work unfold when organizations decide to use AI. We have carried out ethnographic observations during one and a half year in a Danish, cross-municipal AI-project and the analysis shows that AI-digitalization is realized – among other things – through negotiations of what AI is and can be. These negotiations include leadership work which is to a large extent invisible as it is undervalued and overlooked in many of the accounts purporting AI as a turnkey solution.