Generative AI in Decision Preparation : Workflow Efficiency and Process Integrity in Swedish Railway and Telecommunications

Sammanfattning

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in professional knowledgework, especially for drafting, summarising, and processing information. While these tools offer workflow efficiency gains, they also raise important questions about whether such speed can be achieved without weakening the reliability, traceability, and defensibility of organisational decision preparation. Objectives: This thesis examines how professionals in Swedish railway and telecommunications organisations experience GenAI’s role in shaping workflow efficiency and process integrity in decision preparation. Methodology: The study adopts an interpretivist qualitative approach and is based on ten semi-structured interviews with operational, engineering, and managerial professionals from two Swedish high-tech sectors. The empirical material was analysed using thematic analysis. Results: The findings show that, according to the interviewed professionals, GenAI makes parts of decision preparation faster, particularly drafting, summarisation, and information structuring. At the same time, these gains are accompanied by a continued need for checking and validation. Trust in GenAI remained conditional and was shaped by personal review, source traceability, and organisational approval. Verification routines were used consistently, but they remained informal and undocumented. Conclusions: According to the respondents, GenAI improves workflow efficiency, but these gains still depend on human judgement and verification. In practice, process integrity is maintained through checking routines carried out by professionals, but these routines are not formalised in organisational governance. This creates a blind spot between everyday use and organisational accountability. Recommendations for future research: Future research could examine how verification practices develop over time, whether they become more formalised, and how these dynamics differ across organisational and cultural settings.