Thriving in the Age of AI
A Salutogenic Framework for Workers, Organizations, and the Future of Meaningful Work
ABSTRACT
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into the modern workplace presents one of the most consequential psychosocial challenges of our era. Conventional discourse oscillates between techno-utopian promises of liberation from drudgery and dystopian fears of mass displacement. This working paper charts a third path — rooted in Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic paradigm — that asks not ‘How harmful is AI to workers?’ but rather ‘What conditions allow workers to move toward health, coherence, and flourishing in AI-augmented environments?’ Drawing on the foundational triad of Comprehensibility, Manageability, and Meaningfulness (the Sense of Coherence), combined with the Job Demands-Resources model, Self-Determination Theory, and emerging empirical data on ‘AI brain fry,’ we develop a comprehensive framework for assessing and enhancing worker well-being across representative job categories. We argue that the pathogenic effects of poorly designed AI implementation — cognitive overload, deskilling, identity erosion, and decision fatigue — are not inevitable consequences of the technology, but rather products of how organizations choose to deploy it. A salutogenic organizational architecture can transform AI from a source of chronic stress into a Generalized Resistance Resource: a tool that strengthens workers’ capacity to navigate complexity, sustain meaning, and thrive.
Introduction
We stand at an inflection point. In the span of fewer than three years, artificial intelligence has moved from a specialized research domain into the core infrastructure of work itself — authoring reports, diagnosing patients, writing code, managing logistics, screening candidates, and orchestrating complex multi-step workflows. The pace of this transformation outstrips any comparable technological shift in modern industrial history.
The dominant discourse around AI and work has been framed almost entirely in pathogenic terms: How many jobs will be eliminated? Which workers are most vulnerable? What are the cognitive costs of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic management? These are legitimate questions. But they are incomplete. They illuminate the disease without illuminating the conditions for health. They identify the threat without mapping the path to resilience.
“The question is not whether AI will change work — it already has. The question is whether that change moves workers toward coherence or toward chaos.”
— Institute for Salutogenesis, 2026
The Institute for Salutogenesis proposes a different starting orientation. Rooted in Aaron Antonovsky’s foundational insight — that health is not the absence of stressors but the presence of resources that enable navigation of a stressor-saturated world — we ask: What makes it possible for workers to thrive in AI-augmented environments? What organizational conditions, individual capacities, and design principles move people along the continuum from dysfunction toward flourishing?
This working paper presents our initial framework for answering those questions. It proceeds in five movements: (1) the psychology of work in pre-AI baseline conditions; (2) the nature and trajectory of AI integration into the workforce; (3) the documented psychological impacts of AI augmentation, with particular attention to the phenomenon now known as ‘AI brain fry’; (4) a salutogenic reframing of those impacts across representative job categories; and (5) strategic recommendations for workers, organizations, and policymakers.