Abstract:

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly positioned as essential for manufacturing competitiveness, yet its implementation poses significant challenges for managers seeking to align technological change with human-centred manufacturing principles. While human-centred manufacturing is widely advocated, there is limited empirical insight into how such principles are enacted in practice during AI adoption. Drawing on a prospective sensemaking perspective, this qualitative study examines how manufacturing managers make sense of implementing AI while pursuing a human-centred approach to manufacturing, based on nine semi-structured interviews with senior managers across five manufacturing organisations in Ireland. The findings reveal that managers’ sensemaking of AI adoption is characterised by temporal complexity, involving an ongoing interplay between present understandings of AI and imagined future possibilities. This study shows that human-centred AI implementation in manufacturing is shaped by managers’ prospective sensemaking, which is temporally complex and identity-dependent, producing divergent enactments of human-centred manufacturing in practice. By foregrounding managerial sensemaking, the study contributes to research on human-centred manufacturing, AI adoption, and prospective sensemaking, offering empirically grounded insight into how human-centred AI is negotiated under conditions of uncertainty.