April 4-6, 2024 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Innovations in Health Communication
Innovations in Health Communication
Abstract: Communications and the Dominant Coalition: Shaping Responsible AI Within the Organizational Ecosystem
A new wave of technology is washing over healthcare, as the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI) unleashes profound leaps for the industry. Such innovations as automation, big data analysis, and self-learning chatbots are each fueling a new realm of human-AI collaboration (Haan, 2023). In healthcare, AI integrates and learns from large sets of data to support diagnosis, clinical decision making, and personalized medicine – and AI retains importance across the many teams within a health system (Siala & Wang, 2022; Trocin et al., 2021). Yet the leaps in technology come with a raft of risks and potential “ethical nightmares” to confront organizations as AI expands across the economy (Blackman & Nino, 2023, p. 3). To mitigate against these risks, responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) has emerged as a pivot to embrace moral responsibility and ethics in AI to guide the expanding algorithmic systems and the people and organizations who deploy them (Dignum, 2019; Tigard, 2021). Within organizations, responsible AI involves policy making and self-imposed regulation and is increasingly seen as a core framework to prevent damaging ethical consequences of AI enablement that arise from the porous interface between decision-making by humans and the algorithms that drive data selection in the AI environment. Human agents and their organizations play a key role in RAI, including the communications professionals who develop content and consume data to implement organizational priorities. Communications, as a part of the fabric of organizational decision making, has been greatly influenced by the expansive growth of AI, with considerations around task workflow and ethical exposure (Galloway & Swiatek, 2018; Gouda et al., 2020). The aim of the present study is to uncover the role of health communicators within organizations in addressing RAI, specifically around ethical deployment of AI and the contributions of communicators inside and outside of an organization’s dominant coalition to orient a health system around the emerging technology. As Bowen (2015) asserts, the dominant coalition is an influential concept in communications scholarship, framed around the intersection of communicators interfacing with this powerful decision-making group and gaining organizational autonomy and influence. The role of communicators – both inside and outside of the dominant coalition – carries implications for how these professionals within health systems can affect and respond to organizational policy making and norms surrounding RAI in everyday practice. Communicators are rapidly embracing AI, and this study examines the linkage of ethics in AI to communicator influence across the policy matrix, socio-political environment, and corporate norms in the context of the fast-moving AI expansion. Using a mixed-method approach of survey and qualitative interviews, this study sheds light on an under-examined area of scholarship: exploration of the attitudes and perceptions of communicators as they navigate AI and influence an organization’s ethical apparatus to advance the interests of its stakeholders and the enterprise. The present study examines this phenomenon, integrating research on RAI, organizational regulation, and the role of communicators operating both inside and outside of the dominant coalition framed in the context of the rapidly expanding AI universe.