Simon Altmejd was hired over the summer as an assistant professor in management at the Telfer school. His research focuses on how algorithms and AI shape organizational relationships, knowledge and control. We interviewed him to learn more about his research interests.
Why did you choose to study management issues? Any personal motivation?
Before academia, I worked in technological innovation as an engineer and consultant. While I valued the dynamism and creativity this career afforded, I became concerned with how digital innovations were reshaping organizational relationships. I now seek to understand how emerging technologies can support organizations while preserving meaningful human connection. At its core, this is a management question.
How does your PhD training inform your current research?
During my PhD, I conducted research in a large trucking company operating across rural Ontario and Quebec. Facing strong pressure to digitize, the organization also sought to preserve its ties to local communities, which was its main competitive advantage. By working as a material handler and shadowing truckers, dispatchers and managers, I saw first-hand how technology could produce dystopian forms of control, as sometimes documented in Amazon warehouses. However, I also saw how it could be designed to strengthen relationships and hold communities together.
Looking ahead, what projects are you most excited to be working on?
My upcoming projects will examine how health-care professionals and AI scientists collaborate to produce knowledge and how algorithms can help improve home-care services in Canada.
Across these projects, I pay particular attention to relationships among different actors and to how emerging technologies are reshaping these relationships, with consequences for work, knowledge production and meaning.
In the age of AI agents, these questions are even more important to answer, and so I’ve also been working on methodological ways to observe qualitatively how AI agents and humans collaborate in complex collaboration settings.
How can your research influence business communities in Canada?
My research can help managers, community leaders and grassroots organizations better understand how digital technologies reshape relationships between different groups, and how these technologies can be designed and governed to strengthen, rather than erode, those relationships.
For example, in the trucking company I studied, I observed operations workers on loading docks developing close collaborations with white-collar employees. Despite differences in background, age, gender and culture, these collaborations often generated both social connection and organizational value. What appeared to foster these positive outcomes was a shared sense of responsibility and interconnectedness, a “moral commonwealth.”
These insights are particularly important in settings vulnerable to digital disruption, including rural communities, health-care services and non-profit organizations across Canada.
