The future of work is drastically changing due to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into smart products and automated industry 4.0 processes. This requires the emergence of new design paradigms and educational approaches that develop our ability to navigate the ethical and social issues that AI brings. This research develops a new participatory method to address this gap in organisations. The paper focuses specifically on how to design the relationship of humans and AIs working together. It brings new ways on how to help organisations to explore this relationship, how to surface human and AI strengths and preferences on how these are combined when working together with AI. The research draws on how cultural differences affect AI development in the UK and Japan, to explore different ways of creating a coevolving, collaborative work relationship between humans and AI.

The paper describes the design, development and evaluation of rethinkAI™, through a series of workshops, in the context of executive education with global engineering industries. RethinkAI™ was designed, tested and refined through a series of three workshops with business managers and evaluated in a final workshop with 24 multinational Chief Operating Officers (CFOs) in the engineering industry involved in the decisions of integrating AI into their products and processes. The paper analyses the results from its application and explores how this participatory method can be a valuable tool in surfacing the consequences of AI and robotics on work and designing collaborative ways for humans and AIs to work together. The analysis indicates that the use of human strengths and participatory design can help build up organisation’s ability in surfacing and mitigating social and ethical issues when designing AI into products and services. Designing the Relationship of humans and AI at work remains a significant topic of research and the work presented in this paper is a timely investigation and contribution to this topic.