Talking about machines: discursive sensemaking and workplace learning in the age of AI

Abstract

The diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into organisational settings presents new challenges for professional learning. Unlike earlier technologies, machine-learning systems are characterised by opacity, adaptability, and indeterminate outputs, which complicates how professionals understand, trust, and integrate them into practice. While research on workplace learning has examined digital tools as mediators of knowledge acquisition, less attention has been paid to how professionals discursively negotiate the meaning of AI itself. This article examines sensemaking during the development and attempted implementation of an AI tool for maritime operations. Based on an ethnographic study of a two-year innovation project involving developers, data scientists, captains, and shore managers, the analysis focuses on interactional episodes of dialogue and negotiation. The study shows how developers’ sensegiving, often framed through metaphors of improved vision and prediction, clashed with maritime professionals’ counter-narratives grounded in pragmatic routines, institutional constraints, and conceptions of competence. These discursive tensions limited the possibility of collaborative learning and hindered adoption. By conceptualising sensemaking as a situated discursive accomplishment embedded in sociomaterial practice, the article contributes to research on workplace learning and technology by advancing a contextual model of inter-professional sensemaking that illuminates the conditions under which emerging technologies are integrated, reinterpreted, or resisted.

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