Park, Jiyong, Myunghwan Lee, Yoonseock Son, Gene Moo Lee. “Labor Unions and AI Investment: How Workforce Institutions Shape AI Investments and Firm Value”, Under Review.

• The first three authors equally contributed to the work.
• Presentations: CIST (2024), WISE (2024), ISR-PDW (2025).
• Nominated for Best Paper Award at WISE 2024

Despite growing debates about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the future of work, little is known about how firms’ efforts to build AI capabilities interact with workforce dynamics. Unlike prior information technologies, AI’s capacity to automate nonroutine and cognitive tasks creates qualitatively different workforce concerns, making union responses to AI theoretically and empirically distinct. As labor unions become key stakeholders in discussions on AI, we examine how unionization influences firms’ AI investments and moderates their impact on firm value. Using a novel dataset of U.S. public firms that integrates human capital–based measures of AI investment, unionization status, and operational and employee-perception indicators, we employ a long-difference design to capture changes in AI investments and firm value following unionization. Our findings show that unionization is associated with cautious AI investments, especially in firms with lower perceived job security and operations more exposed to AI disruption. Rather than reflecting simple resistance to technology, this pattern suggests that unions introduce additional organizational scrutiny in decisions about AI investments when workforce concerns are salient. At the same time, union presence can strengthen the value generated from AI investments once they are implemented. We find that unions amplify the positive relationship between AI investments and firm value, particularly in firms with stronger labor relations, reflected in active employee involvement and higher job-security satisfaction. Taken together, these findings highlight unions’ dual role: tempering and disciplining AI investments at the adoption stage while enhancing downstream value realization through more deliberate and workforce-aligned implementation.