AI technology is an increasingly common part of many people’s working lives – but not everyone has the opportunity to benefit equally. Dr Jade Brooks tells Alice Webb Liddall about her research into how workplaces can bridge the digital divide.

The vision “that all of us have what we need to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the digital world,” was introduced by the then Labour-led government in its March 2019 Digital Inclusion Blueprint.

Five years on, and digital technology is only becoming more complex. Alongside that growing complexity is a growing digital divide – a widening gap between people who have the access to technology and the resources to use it to its potential, and those who do not.

“There are groups of people in society that are either partially or fully excluded from using digital technologies. We know there is still an access problem – to devices or stable internet or support needed,” says Dr Jade Brooks, lecturer in Information Systems Management at the University of Auckland. “In the workplace, we are increasingly interested in: ‘even if people have access, are they able to use it meaningfully to participate in work, and in communities?’” Brooks’ work focuses on how new technologies can be used to promote inclusion, rather than deepening the divide.

For those raised in the digital age, and with the resources allowing them to adapt to it, new technology has the potential to positively influence how they work, live, communicate and learn. But for those who aren’t digital natives, the risk of falling behind is growing larger than ever.

Brooks has spent her academic career researching the social and organisational effects of digital technology on groups often excluded from technology, work or society, from refugee start-up and incubator initiatives, to building self-determination of disadvantaged groups, to understanding how charity organisations who lack digital skills garner support and income through digital platforms. She’s interested in how knowledge, power and identity dynamics play a role in how technology is used, and how people can participate in it.

Most recently, Brooks and colleague Randy Wong have been conducting a study with the University of Auckland Business School’s Centre of Digital Enterprise (CODE), involving over 800 people who use generative AI regularly in or for their jobs. The study considers how generative AI applications help people to integrate into both organisational and wider professional communities, and access opportunities they might otherwise miss. Brooks hopes it will help to paint a clearer picture of not only how AI is perceived in workplaces, but how individuals from different demographics are included in this technology, how included they are in work because of the technology, and how it impacts their job performance.

“We know the end-goal – digital inclusion – and we know organisations are talking about what that should look like at work. What we don’t yet know is how to get there,” says Brooks.

Her aim is to understand how we can create more digitally accessible workplaces by researching how some groups are excluded from generative AI technology, then helping organisations apply those lessons to support digital inclusion and to use inclusive design when creating new digital tools.

“Initial analysis suggests that people who felt excluded from the [AI] technology reported lower scores across all dimensions of digital inclusion at work and job performance compared to those who did not feel excluded,” says Brooks.

“So there’s a link there between exclusion from this technology and a lack of digital inclusion in the workplace as a whole which we are looking to further explore.”

In Aotearoa, we don’t need to look too far back to see the real harms of the digital divide. School lessons moving online during the pandemic highlighted the need for better understanding of digital inequality as students – largely those in rural, lower socio-economic groups – fell behind due to tech shortfalls such as limited access to the internet and internet capable devices. A 2020 Ministry of Education report into the digital divide during Covid-19 identified between 60,000 and 80,000 “unconnected households where school children were living” during the pandemic.

But addressing access to technology is only the first layer in addressing digital exclusion. “Some people are unable to participate in the same way as others, and there are definitely efforts to understand what those disparities are and why they’re occurring, and how we overcome that,” says Brooks.

The complexity of this issue, and of the people who are hurt most by digital divides, means that there is no blanket solution. “Women, single parents, those with physical or learning disabilities and the carers of those individuals, indigenous communities, refugees or forced migrants, ethnic minorities, sexual and gender minorities” are just part of the long list of people Brooks says can be affected by the digital divide in different ways.

It’s a topic close to the heart for Brooks, who has faced daily challenges in the academic field due to her dyslexia. She says she has found generative AI – the umbrella term for content-generating technology like ChatGPT and Claude – an immense help in processing and organising information and structuring her day.

“Those technologies have been a game changer in the way that I can access and really participate in academia and teaching in my job, in a way that I might have struggled to do before… For me, at least as an individual, it’s taken away some of those barriers,” says Brooks.

But with every person whose work has benefitted, there are also those left out of the ongoing drive to prioritise time and cost-saving digital technologies like generative AI in the workplace. Initial findings from her latest study show that minority groups and those with disabilities reported feeling digital exclusion at work at higher rates than other groups or those that didn’t identify.

For Brooks and the team, this signals a need to provide targeted interventions to ensure equitable access to AI technologies for these populations.

“What we hope is that our study will give us a big picture to say: how do people perceive the relationship between generative AI and inclusion at work, and what is the impact on their job performance?

“It also allows us to zoom in and look at specific groups – people we know can be disadvantaged or excluded – and ask: how do they experience inclusion at work because of the technologies that they’re using?”

As the working world becomes more reliant on, and forever changed by, advances in digital technology, the need to address the divide becomes even greater. Globally, there is a social push to address issues like this. Many of the 17 UN Sustainability Goals are addressed at least in part by the work Brooks is doing at the University of Auckland Business School, including reduced inequality, quality education, and gender equality.

And, she says, if we get it right, digital inclusion will benefit everyone – just as the digital tools themselves have the potential to do. Findings from a 2017 report on digital inclusion showed the potential for over $1 billion a year in economic benefit to New Zealand if universal digital inclusion is achieved.

“Technologies can create divides, but they can also help to overcome divides,” says Brooks. “So how can we look at technologies in a way, and support people in a way to use those technologies so that they are inclusive rather than part of the problem?”

With her research focusing on understanding these divides, Brooks knows it will take a multi-pronged approach from government, businesses and individuals to create systems that benefit all types of worker in the ever-changing digital world.

“The end goal is this kind of empowerment or structural change that can only come when individuals have access and meaningfully participate and then start to become empowered by the technologies that they’re using at work.”