Abstract
As professional collaboration increasingly shifts to digital and asynchronous modes, workers use collaboration technologies not only to coordinate tasks but also to manage their professional visibility and reputation. To examine how these practices could evolve as AI becomes more embedded in the collaboration environment, a speculative design approach was adopted to make near-future scenarios experiential. We prototyped speculative AI systems that support visibility through employee self-report reflection, performance scoring, AI-enhanced meeting appearance, communication delegation, and AI-use disclosure as probes for a series of immersive and interactive scenario-based interviews. The findings uncover selective disclosure of AI use to manage professional image, conditional trust in delegating self-representation to AI, attempts to manipulate AI evaluation, and stress resulting from continuous assessment. We contribute (1) empirical insights about potential AI-mediated visibility practices, and (2) design recommendations for collaboration technologies to support control, authenticity, and healthy visibility practices in AI-powered professional environments.
Keywords
Professional visibility, AI, Speculative design, Future of work
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1555
Citation
Ebrahimi, F., Mehrvarz, M., and Cila, N. (2026) Is this the “me” they want to see? Exploring near-future adaptations of AI for professional visibility and self-presentation, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1555
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Is this the “me” they want to see? Exploring near-future adaptations of AI for professional visibility and self-presentation
As professional collaboration increasingly shifts to digital and asynchronous modes, workers use collaboration technologies not only to coordinate tasks but also to manage their professional visibility and reputation. To examine how these practices could evolve as AI becomes more embedded in the collaboration environment, a speculative design approach was adopted to make near-future scenarios experiential. We prototyped speculative AI systems that support visibility through employee self-report reflection, performance scoring, AI-enhanced meeting appearance, communication delegation, and AI-use disclosure as probes for a series of immersive and interactive scenario-based interviews. The findings uncover selective disclosure of AI use to manage professional image, conditional trust in delegating self-representation to AI, attempts to manipulate AI evaluation, and stress resulting from continuous assessment. We contribute (1) empirical insights about potential AI-mediated visibility practices, and (2) design recommendations for collaboration technologies to support control, authenticity, and healthy visibility practices in AI-powered professional environments.