Stanford University

WORKING PAPER

Eliciting Domain Expertise in the Absence of Formal Authority: The Case of AI Developers and Domain Experts in a Large Firm

Luca Vendraminelli
Devesh Narayanan
Arvind Karunakaran



September 2024

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Professionals need to interact with domain experts within organizations to elicit their expertise for executing strategic projects and accomplishing work. However, these professionals often do not have formal authority over domain experts, leading to several challenges in eliciting expertise. When and how are professionals able (or unable) to elicit expertise from domain experts over whom they have no formal authority? We examine this research question by drawing on four years of qualitative field work conducted at a large multinational fashion company, Weave (a pseudonym). We compare two AI development projects—involving one successful and one unsuccessful attempt to elicit domain expertise—within Weave that required interactions between AI developers and domain experts (e.g., supply chain allocators, store managers, retail finance managers). We unpack the interplay between task and organizational structures in enabling (or constraining) the effectiveness of AI developers in eliciting domain expertise. In particular, we show that in situations that are characterized by jurisdictional clarity (versus ambiguity), task centrality (versus peripherality), and task enactment homogeneity (versus heterogeneity), AI developers were more effective in accessing domain experts and eliciting their expertise. Building on these findings, we develop a model outlining how the interplay between task and organizational structure shapes both the legibility of domain experts as well as the concentrated nature of domain expertise, and its consequences for the effective (or ineffective) elicitation of domain expertise.

Stanford University