A.I. Might Actually Help Us Find A Greater Sense Of Purpose At Work

This is the question that Lareina Yee, senior partner at McKinsey and chair of the McKinsey Technology Council, poses to me as we discuss the implications of generative A.I. for workers over Zoom.

Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the world has been in a tizzy about the idea of robots, quite literally, taking over our jobs. A 2023 survey conducted by Fortune and The Harris Poll found that 40% of workers familiar with ChatGPT worry it will replace them. Thousands of them have already lost their jobs to the technology. Top VC Kai-Fu Lee even predicts that A.I. will displace 50% of our jobs by 2027.

If true, this could seriously impact our career trajectory and bank accounts. But it could also threaten our sense of purpose, which many of us derive from and even search for in our work, especially in light of the Great Resignation. McKinsey research finds that 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is defined by their work. If A.I. takes that work away, where would that leave us?

It all depends on how we use our time, which is the point Yee is making when she throws out her question. She believes that generative A.I. will actually allow us to find greater purpose and joy at work by replacing our job’s mundane tasks, freeing us up to foster human connections and invest in personal growth.

“We don’t have data that shows how people spend it, but the optimist in me says you would spend it with things that machines can’t do,” she says. “How we use our time is a scarcity, and if we were able, as humans, to move our time to a higher quality?”

Then the potential is endless, she says. 

Purpose is what makes us human

Purpose is just one component of meaningful work, which philosopher and psychology researcher Frank Martela defines as work that holds value beyond helping us make ends meet. Martela, an assistant professor at Aalto University in Finland and co-founder and chairman of the board of Filosofian Akatemia—a company that measures engagement, motivation, and meaningfulness at work—has spent his career investigating the meaning of life. In 2018, he released research alongside theologian Anne B. Pessi that found significance, self-realization, and broader purpose are all key dimensions of meaningful work. 

Broader purpose—feeling that one’s work helps other people or some good cause—is the most typical source of meaningfulness at work, he says. “That’s why nurses, doctors, and firefighters are typically seen to be having particularly meaningful work—in their job, the impact of other people is tangible and potentially lifesaving.”

But we also derive meaning from the fact that we are able to express ourselves through our work, he adds. “Artists or athletes feel that they get paid for doing what they love doing. An extrovert might love their job as a salesperson as they get to engage with people.”

The idea that we should center our sense of identity and self expression in everything we do has long driven our understanding of who we are and who we want to be, explains Erin Cech, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. She says this search for self-expression, coupled with a more precarious job market than our parents experienced, has led us to view our jobs as a big investment that we think we might as well center our self-expression in.

This is compelling for two reasons, she says: One, the individualization of American society has changed the way we engage in our communities, with fewer places to anchor our sense of identity to; two; we’re spending a lot more time in our jobs.

“People are finding that sense of self in their work because that’s a kind of ready made place for us culturally,” she explains. “And if you’re working so many hours, it can be a way of feeling some kind of sense of purpose or identity to have a job that aligns with that.”

Purpose is what differentiates humans from other animals, she and Martela both point out. He says that humans can ask “why” questions—Why am I doing this task? Why am I doing this job?  We are thus seeking justification or value in our activities, he says, which leads us to meaning and purpose: “We want our lives to matter and make a difference, to have value.”

Fewer mundane tasks, more human connections

A.I. can be good for the meaningfulness at work, Martela says, because it can allow us to be more creative and efficient in other tasks if it does the mundane ones. “The more A.I. takes care of the boring routine stuff, the more we can concentrate on the exciting, creative, and challenging stuff,” he says.

This is exactly what Yee was getting at when she spoke of A.I. freeing up our time to connect with our coworkers or invest in our skills, training, and network (our work experience accounts for half of our lifetime earnings, after all, according to McKinsey research). This can all make us even better at our jobs, she says, pointing to a sales rep as an example. 

They may make their quota, but if they had even more time to deepen their customer relationships, “that’s going to have a benefit over time for their salary, for the company’s profitability, for their effectiveness, and how much they enjoy their job,” she says. 

She admits that purpose and meaning at work aren’t easy things to measure and that we’re just on the cusp of researching them. “But it also means that the business leadership decisions we make when we deploy these solutions and how we think about using that extra time is actually really important,” she says. 

A.I. tools are also remarkably good at displaying empathy, Yee adds, acting as a coach for workers to help them build deeper connections another way. A study published in Jama that compared responses to patient questions from a physician and from a chatbot found that patients preferred the chatbot’s bedside manner. Imagine if A.I. could prompt doctors with more empathetic phrases, Yee says, or a manager who needs to give a report tough feedback. 

This could do wonders for our sense of purpose, which research shows increases, alongside satisfaction and fulfillment, among workers who proactively invest in work relationships. But Cech points out the risk of A.I. mimicking the relational aspects of people at work. 

Roles held by forward-facing employees are among those most likely to change in the face of A.I.; if it fundamentally changes our ability to have relationships with our colleagues and our customers by doing the connecting for us (rather than teaching us), she says, that could “have a substantial impact on day-to-day job satisfaction” considering that work relationships are such a core piece of it.

By being better than us in many tasks, Martela says, A.I. can challenge the meaningfulness of doing those tasks ourselves: What is the point of me doing this, when A.I. can do this better? “However, many still find chess a meaningful sport, even though modern A.I. beats any human being in a heartbeat,” he says. “So this might not be as big a threat as some make it seem.”