Managers as Gatekeepers in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is frequently cast as a transformative technology that will raise productivity while displacing human work, yet organizational adoption remains uneven and aggregate effects are mixed. We examine whether middle managers contribute to this gap by acting as gatekeepers to AI adoption. In a pre-registered survey experiment of 2,000 managers in the United States and United Kingdom, respondents were randomly assigned to view videos summarizing recent evidence on AI’s productivity benefits, its labor-displacing potential, or a placebo control. Exposure to information about labor displacement leads to a large reduction in intended AI adoption and advocacy (by 0.4–0.5 standard deviations) and a moderate reduction in staffing intentions (by 0.2 standard deviations). In contrast, information about productivity benefits has no significant average effect, although it increases advocacy among managers with low prior familiarity with AI. These findings indicate that middle managers’ responses to the information environment shape both technology adoption and employment intentions. Rather than inducing substitution away from labor and toward AI, information about AI’s labor-displacing potential leads managers to scale back both planned AI adoption and their staffing intentions.