Diagnosing Doctors and AI : What the introduction of AI can tell us about the professional role of physicians

Sammanfattning: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being implemented in various industries and shows promise within healthcare. AI has potential to perform tasks that a professional would traditionally do, and it thus looks to be a disruptive technology. Professional workers, like physicians, are likely to resist such implementations to protect the high status of their profession. As professional workers and healthcare hold significant roles in society, we found that research on how they are affected by AI is needed. This study takes place in the beginning of the introduction in Swedish hospitals. To gain insight into how physicians accept and relate AI to their professional work, we ask the question ‘Do physicians see AI as a threat to their professional role?’ With an abductive, qualitative case-study approach we have conducted eight semi- structured interviews with physicians with various experience and knowledge of working with AI. Theory of institutional work for maintenance allowed for more grounding in answering our question. Further, realisations from previous studies on change served to explain why our findings did not turn out as expected. We highlight a perspective of viewing technological change as a link in a chain of events, rather than studying one implementation at a time.