The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

Although organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a path-way to competitiveness and innovation, organizations’ perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers’ perspec-tives on AI’s economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibil-ity, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redis-tribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.

Authors: Inha Cha, Catherine Wieczorek, Richmond Y. Wong

Published in: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Publication date: 2026-04-13

Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790429

Source license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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