AI Empowerment of Asian-Australian Migrant Workers: Progress, Potentials, and Patterns

As Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, becomes integral to organizational practices, its capacity to augment human capabilities presents opportunities and challenges. We focus on the integration of AI into the workplace, emphasizing its impact on Asian-Australian migrant workers—a group frequently transitioning from developing to developed economies and facing unique workplace challenges. We explore how AI may not only enhance job performance and integration by overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers but also influences perceptions of overqualification among these workers. Employing psychological empowerment theory and the information systems fusion framework, alongside time-lag surveys and K-means clustering, we introduce a novel AI empowerment scale and investigate the nuanced effects of AI on immigrant workers. Our findings reveal that while AI-driven psychological empowerment increases technology infusion use and overall job performance, it also underscores significant variations in how different demographic groups experience these benefits, offering new insights into the complex interplay between AI empowerment and employee perceptions. The study advances psychological empowerment and perceived overqualification research by revealing AI’s varied impacts across workforce clusters. It underscores the need to manage AI carefully to avoid workplace inequalities and calls for further exploration of AI’s dynamics in diverse settings.