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This paper explores the integration of social workers into technology teams within the AI sector, emphasizing their critical roles in product management, governance, and policy-making. By mapping the competencies required for technology decision-making against existing social work education standards, the authors highlight how social workers can effectively contribute to AI development and deployment. The study identifies five key roles for social workers in technology, advocating for a deeper engagement between social work and technology to ensure ethical and effective AI applications in human services.
Social workers could redefine tech decision-making by leveraging their unique insights in AI development and deployment across critical human service domains.
Artificial intelligence is moving the technology sector into domains social work has long served, including crisis response, mental health care, benefits administration, vocational rehabilitation, and child welfare. Social workers meet technology teams as users of their tools, as subjects in their datasets, and as first responders to what those systems deploy, yet they study these systems from outside the settings where the decisions are made. This paper introduces the standard roles on a technology product team and the decisions each one controls, reviews the disciplines around AI-era technology together with the social work scholarship that meets each, and identifies five groups of technology decision roles social workers can hold across the technology industry, human service organizations, and policy institutions, spanning product, governance, organizational technology leadership, grantee collaboration, and policy work. Product management is our primary example. We set the nine competencies of the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards against the tasks that role performs to show where MSW training already teaches the method the job asks for. We then specify the technical understanding these roles require, extend the profession's technology ethics from use to deployment, and close with a research agenda for the profession's technology workforce.
