Concerns and Strategic Responses of Older Workers Navigating Generative AI in Bridge Employment

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming workplaces at a rapid pace. This disproportionately affects vulnerable communities, including older workers (OWs) who re-enter the workforce through bridge employment prior to final retirement. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals, we examine how OWs navigate GenAI-driven disruptions while pursuing bridge roles, focusing on their concerns about GenAI integration and their responses to these changes. Our findings show that OWs experienced both temporal and structural disruptions across all stages of the bridge employment decision-making process due to GenAI. In response, they reconfigured their tasks through different forms of boundary work aimed at restoring stability and continuity. We conceptualize these responses as AI resilience, which reshaped OWs' bridge employment decision-making into an ongoing process of negotiation and adaptation. We conclude by offering recommendations to reduce burnout among OWs by balancing individual-level AI resilience strategies with meso-level AI resilience collectives and macro-level adversarial and contestable AI-mediated organizational structures.