What Makes Me Valuable? How Independent Professionals Negotiate Expertise and Identity with AI

Abstract

This research examines the dual pressures shaping how independent professionals engage with artificial intelligence technologies. Drawing on qualitative data collected over the last 5 years, I explore how these workers navigate contradictory forces around AI adoption: external pressures that push them toward greater productivity and efficiency, and internal pressures rooted in professional identity that drive them to protect their core expertise. The findings underscore a fundamental tension between performance optimization and identity preservation, leading independent professionals to adopt varied strategies—from selective integration of AI tools to outright resistance or reconceptualization of what their expertise means. This work contributes to management scholarship by illuminating the microfoundations of technology adoption decisions, deepening our understanding of how professional identity shapes responses to technological change and revealing how independent professionals negotiate their legitimacy and value in increasingly AI-augmented markets.

Bio

Ingrid Erickson is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. An ethnographer and organizational scholar by training, her research centers on how the values and designs of technologies, especially artificial intelligence, influence how we communicate with one another, navigate and inhabit spaces, and engage in new forms of work. Her current research focuses on the human qualities and capacities that may be required (or are becoming revalued) in the increasingly automated future. In 2022-23, she spent five months as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), where she began a new research project about the experiences of Indian women in their roles as tech entrepreneurs. She received her Ph.D. from the Center for Work, Technology and Organization in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.