Roadmap
Workplace Metric Shift
Royal College of Art - Research Paper
Company
Royal College of Art - Independant Research Project
Role
Researcher
Duration
4 months, 2025
Challenge
The rapid adoption of AI in workplaces has created a visibility and governance gap. Leadership often lacks insight into which tools employees are using, what risks they introduce, and where upskilling is most urgently needed. Without structured data on AI adoption, companies risk security breaches, compliance failures, energy inefficiency, and the erosion of critical human skills.
This creates blind spots: wasted investments, hidden risks, ethical concerns, and a widening gap between leadership decisions and employee realities.
Approach
Mapped how AI is currently used across workplaces through interviews and a participatory workshop with designers, engineers, and strategists.
Identified gaps between leadership awareness and employee AI use, including hidden tools, skill gaps, and lack of guidance.
Developed future scenarios to explore how AI adoption could shape workplace culture, leadership, and human agency by 2035.
Created a leadership guidebook and platform concept to help organizations reflect on AI use and make more responsible decisions.
Future plan is to build a dashboard that can provide insights on AI usage in the workplace.
Solution
Designed a leadership guidebook that helps organizations question when AI should support human work and when human judgment should lead.
Proposed WMS Dashboard, a platform that maps AI tools used across teams, surfaces skill gaps, and creates communication between employees and leadership.
Results
Revealed a major gap between leadership awareness and the AI tools employees are already using daily
Surfaced hidden patterns of AI adoption across roles, showing where support, policy, and training are missing.
Demonstrated how futures methods can help organizations anticipate workplace impacts before AI systems are widely deployed.
Introduced a practical framework that helps leaders align AI adoption with human skills, trust, and long-term organisational health.