COVID‐19 and the New Technologies of Organizing: Digital Exhaust, Digital Footprints, and Artificial Intelligence in the Wake of Remote Work

• Author: Paul M. Leonardi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12648
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

COVID-19 and the New Technologies of Organizing:

Digital Exhaust, Digital Footprints, and Artificial

Intelligence in the Wake of Remote Work

Paul M. Leonardi

University of California

Keywords: artificial intelligence, digitization, digital exhaust, organization change, remote

work

Companies have flirted with remote work since the 1970s. Estimates from late 2019

suggested that slightly more than 5 per cent of employees worked remotely with regular-

ity. But as COVID-19 has spread across the globe over the past few months, and shelter-

in-place orders were issued by governments, many companies have initiated a rapid and

wholesale shift to remote work arrangements, at least for knowledge-intensive work.

This shift is enabled by digital technologies that allow workers to communicate via

text, audio, and video and to share and edit data and documents in real-time. As exam-

ples of the dramatic and swift increase in remote work enabled by digital technologies,

Zoom’s daily active user base grew by 67 per cent in March 2020, the number of daily

active users of Microsoft Teams grew from 20 million in November 2019 to 44 million in

March 2020, and Slack added 7,000 new paid customers in February and March, 2020

– roughly 40 per cent more than in each of its previous two quarters. Google announced

it will continue remote work until at least summer 2021 and Twitter extended the oppor-

tunity for all employees to work remotely indefinitely.

Most discussions around this shift to remote work have focused on exploring first-order

effects – areas of organizational behaviour that are likely to change directly following a

transition to working exclusively through digital technologies. Although first-order effects

are important, it is the second-order effects of remote working that have the potential to

be the most profound, but are the most understudied. In this paper, I explore three of

the most important second-order effects likely to shape the trajectory of work for several

decades: (1) Remote work creates vast amounts of digital exhaust, (2) Digital exhaust is

used to turn employees into data representations, and (3) Artificial intelligence (AI) uses

those data representations to predict (and shape) employee behaviour.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 January 2021

doi:10. 1111/jo ms. 126 48

Address for reprints: Paul M. Leonardi, Technology Management Program, 1319 Phelps Hall, University of

California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 (leonardi@ucsb.edu).