Original title: Organizational Technology Ladders: Remote Work and Generative AI Adoption
Gregor Schubert · August 2026
When companies adopt new technology, does it make adopting the next one easier? This study suggests businesses climb an organizational technology ladderthe idea that adopting one technology builds skills and habits that make it easier to adopt the next technology.. Adopting one tool alters hiring and routines, creating skills that shift the costs of using future technologies. The author looked at whether switching to remote work during COVID-19 led companies to adopt generative AI later. Using United States job postings, the study found that a 10 percentage point rise in remote hiring in 2021-2022 increased generative AI mentions in 2023-2024 job ads by 0.4 percentage points across firms. Remote work shifted hiring toward technical and managerial skills that sped up AI adoption. Furthermore, companies with return-to-office mandatescompany policies requiring employees to work from the office, which suggests the firm did not find remote work productive. saw an even larger boost in AI adoption.
You are learning to bake bread for the first time. You struggle with measuring ingredients and timing the rise. But after a few successes, you discover that those same skills make it much easier to bake cakes or pizza later. Here, companies that invested in remote work during the pandemic built technical skills and changed how they hire, lowering the difficulty of later adopting generative AI — just as baking bread teaches skills that transfer to other kinds of baking.
This matters because it shows that a firm's choice about remote work during the pandemic didn't just affect where people sat — it set the stage for which companies would jump into generative AI. That means the skills and hiring patterns built through remote work directly shape who gets left behind in the next wave of automation. For workers, it suggests that the remote work trend could be a signal of coming AI adoption in their industry.
The abstract does not establish that the relationship is causal beyond the IV strategy's assumptions. AI adoption is measured only from job postings, not actual use. The study covers U.S. firms in a specific period, so findings might not apply elsewhere. It does not explore long-term effects or negative consequences.
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Organizational Technology Ladders: Remote Work and Generative AI Adoption — Gregor Schubert
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.