Between Innovation and Erosion: How AI Alters Civil Servants’ Profession and Influences Their Perceptions of Job Attractiveness

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public administration is reshaping how civil servants perform their work, with potentially profound implications for their profession and downstream effects on their perceived job attractiveness. AI systems are different from other information and communication technologies as they can have agent-like characteristics and thus becomes more like a co-worker rather than a tool that employees use. As AI has the ability to perform significantly more complex cognitive tasks, using it on the job may fundamentally alter job profiles and reshape civil servants’ view of their own profession. While AI promises organizational innovativeness and concomitant efficiency gains—factors that may enhance the appeal of joining the civil service—it also risks devaluing human expertise and eroding task meaningfulness by automating routine tasks and standardizing work processes. In particular, AI may alter the ways in which public servants perform tasks, what competencies and skills they will need, i.e., how much the skills they currently possess will be needed and valued, how socially significant they find their work, and what it means to be a civil servant. While there exists some research specifically on how street-level bureaucrats experience AI adoption in their work and especially its impacts on their discretion, we lack insights about how civil servants experience the impacts of AI on their profession more generally and how these perceived impacts matter for their overall perceptions of the attractiveness of civil service employment. This paper seeks to close this research gap by answering the following research question: How do public employees perceive AI adoption in government to affect their profession and how do these perceptions relate to civil service job attractiveness? To theorize likely major impacts of AI on civil servants’ jobs, we draw on the job characteristics model and link it to public administration research on job attractiveness. We also expect that the perceived impact of AI adoption affects civil servants differently, depending on personal characteristics relating to their concern about changes in their professional skills and their capacity to realize social impact through their work. By studying such heterogeneity, we aim to uncover whether AI adoption leads to divisions in the perception of AI’s impact on civil service work. The analysis is based on a pre-registered set of hypotheses and research design and uses data from an original survey fielded by a professional panel provider among active civil servants in Germany and the Netherlands. It yields novel experimental evidence that advances our understanding of the implications of AI-driven digital transformation in civil services, specifically with regard skill use and task significance in civil servants' work. The study also offers practical recommendations for sustaining public sector attractiveness amid disruptive technological change. With Kristina S. Weißmüller.