From Individual to Collective: Examining Impacts of AI on the Social Ecosystem of Work

The role of Generative AI in the future of knowledge work is hotly debated, but the conversation remains split between the two poles of individualized task productivity and aggregate labor market displacement. Both strip work of its social and organizational context, treating knowledge work as a mechanistic sequence of individual tasks. In this paper we synthesize emerging findings on workplace AI with decades of foundational organizational sociology to examine how AI adoption can disrupt the social architecture of the workplace. We identify three critical sites of such "ecosystemic erosion": the deterioration of the informal relational fabric, the breakdown of intergenerational tacit knowledge transmission, and the evaporation of the functional foundations of collaboration. By shifting the focus from the individual worker to the collective ecosystem, this paper provides insights into the long-term social and structural costs of AI integration. We end with opportunities for AI designers and organizational leaders to shift the AI paradigm from individualized optimization toward collective intelligence and human flourishing.