The Future of Office and Administrative Support Occupations in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Bibliometric Analysis

TL;DR

This bibliometric analysis explores current research trends at the intersection of office work and artificial intelligence, highlighting emerging topics like robotics and smart buildings, and identifying gaps in studies on human factors and worker development.

Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive bibliometric overview of research on AI in office work, revealing key themes and gaps in the existing literature.

Findings

High frequency of keywords: office automation, humans, HCI, AI

Emerging topics: intelligent buildings, robotics, IoT

More research on technology development than on worker development

Abstract

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by the year 2029, the United States will lose a million jobs in the office and administrative support occupations because technology, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to substitute or replace the office and administrative functions performed by office workers. Despite the potential impact AI will have on office work and the important role office workers play in the American economy, we have limited knowledge of the state of the art research in office work at the intersection of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. In this study, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the scholarly literature at the intersection of office work and artificial intelligence. We extracted literature sources from Compendex and Scopus databases and used VOSviewer for visualizing and quantifying our bibliometric analyses. Our findings from keywords analysis indicate that office automation, humans, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence occurred more frequently in the scholarly literature and had high link strengths. Keyword clusters from co-occurrence analysis indicate that intelligent buildings, robotics, and the internet of things are emerging topics in the office work domain. The two clusters related to ergonomics, worker characteristics, human performance, and safety indicate the types of human factors concerns that are more widely studied in office work settings. In summary, our findings on the state-of-the-art research in office work indicate that more studies have been conducted on smart buildings, robotics, and technology development for office work, compared to studies on office workers and their professional development.