Shaping the Future of Work: Tech Professionals, Generative AI, and the Socio-Technical Imaginaries of Digital Transformation

This paper presents early findings from an ongoing ethnographic study investigating how emerging digital transformations—particularly the use of Generative AI (GenAI)—are influencing the future of work among tech professionals in Sweden's digital industries. Employing a bespoke ethnographic methodology and adopting a future-oriented social science agenda, the study examines how and why these professionals engage with and adapt to both established and novel GenAI platforms, thereby actively shaping the trajectory of their digital work environments. Recognising the plurality and unpredictability inherent in digital transformations, the research acknowledges that events and practices infused with socio-technical imaginaries of automated futures participate in shaping what is yet to come. By focusing on how tech professionals experience, anticipate, adopt, and adapt to evolving GenAI platforms, the study underscores the importance of a people-centred and forward-looking examination of everyday interactions with and around these technologies. Transcending sensationalised examples and deterministic narratives, this paper illuminates essential aspects of digitalisation that are frequently overlooked. Consequently, it contributes to sociological understandings of emerging technologies in/at work by offering a nuanced perspective on how imagined futures inform present actions. By integrating a future-oriented social science approach, the research emphasises the necessity of bridging the gap between the futurity of social life and empirical methodologies, recognising the iterative nature of technological and societal change.