Employee Adoption of Generative AI Tools Evidence from Nordic Financial Services and Telecommunications Firms

Sammanfattning

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly transforming organisational work practices. This thesis examines how different firm–level and individual–level factors shape employees’ adoption of GenAI tools in large Nordic financial services and telecommunications firms. By integrating the Technology–Organisation–Environment (TOE) framework with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the study develops a multidimensional perspective on employee-level GenAI adoption. Accordingly, the following research question is formulated: how do firm–level and individual–level factors shape employees’ adoption of GenAI tools in financial services and telecommunications firms?This study follows a qualitative research design based on 16 semi-structured interviews with AI specialists and employees across large Nordic financial services and telecommunications firms. Through thematic analysis, the findings reveal that employees’ GenAI adoption is shaped primarily by organisational support structures, governance systems, employees’perceptions and motivation, and social knowledge-sharing. Regulatory conditions primarily influence adoption indirectly through governance systems. Technological capabilities emerged as an important enabling condition, but not as an independent driver of adoption.The findings further demonstrate that GenAI adoption differs from many traditional workplace technologies due to its bottom-up nature, where employees actively experiment with AI tools both outside formal organisational systems and beyond workplace settings. This creates new tensions between organisations and employee autonomy. The study contributes theoretically by highlighting increasing overlap between traditional technology adoption frameworks in GenAI contexts and practically by emphasising that successful GenAI adoption requires organisations to balance top-down structures with bottom-up employee initiative.