Work Package 5

VTT

Human-Centric AI, Inclusion, and Skills Development in Manufacturing

In Work Package 5, VTT examines how AI can be designed and implemented to strengthen migrant workers’ experiences of inclusion, well-being, and skills development in the manufacturing sector. WP5 shifts the perspective from AI as a driver of disruption to AI as a potential resource, asking how intelligent systems can be co-created to reduce job demands, enhance job resources, and foster more inclusive industrial workplaces in line with the principles of Industry 5.0.

WP5 investigates how migration-specific job demands, such as language barriers, credential recognition challenges, cultural adaptation pressures, and social isolation, interact with technologically mediated work environments. It asks how these demands affect performance, learning, and belonging, and how AI-enabled tools can mitigate strain while strengthening participation, skill development, and career progression. Central to WP5 is a human-centric and ethics-aware approach to AI: rather than automating decision-making in ways that risk deepening inequalities, the work package explores how AI can democratize access to information, support onboarding and continuous learning, improve communication across linguistic boundaries, and strengthen social integration in diverse industrial communities.

Using qualitative interviews, organizational surveys, and participatory co-design workshops, WP5 works closely with a manufacturing case organization to map migrant workers’ lived experiences of job demands and resources. Based on these insights, AI solution concepts are co-created with migrant and non-migrant employees, HR professionals, and managers. Promising concepts are iteratively refined and, where feasible, tested in real-world settings to assess usability, perceived value, and inclusion impacts. A longitudinal component ensures that AI applications are evaluated not only for technical functionality but also for their evolving effects on well-being, learning, and workplace relations.

Throughout, WP5 foregrounds inclusive design, ethical AI governance, and worker participation. It embeds migrant voices directly into technology development processes, ensuring that AI tools reflect lived realities rather than abstract assumptions. The findings inform AI design principles, organisational guidelines, policy briefs, and stakeholder dialogue with industry actors and social partners. By demonstrating how AI can be aligned with human dignity, diversity, and sustainable industrial transformation, WP5 advances TAIMI’s systemic objective of building technologically advanced yet socially resilient workplaces in Finland’s future of work.