At a time when machines undertake practices previously delegated to human expertise, questions of skill erosion become prominent. Our guests Esko Penttinen and Joona Ruissalo illuminate the intersections of automation and skill erosion, which denotes a situation of decline in people's ability to manage tasks with the same effectiveness as before. With rich empirics from the accounting sector, they share insights on how the "grip of automation" interacts with skill erosion, and on the meaning of this for the lived experience of workers in the sector.

Esko Penttinen is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Aalto University, Department of Information and Service Management. Joona Ruissalo is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the same Department, focusing on cognitive automation in the accounting industry.

Sources:
Rinta-Kahila, Tapani; Penttinen, Esko; Salovaara, Antti; Soliman, Wael; and Ruissalo, Joona (2023) "The Vicious Circles of Skill Erosion: A Case Study of Cognitive Automation," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(5), 1378-1412.
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00829
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol24/iss5/2