OHS Professionals AI Adoption: A UTAUT Research in Brazilian Industry

While artificial intelligence adoption has increased in several industries and sectors, Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) still resists adopting disruptive AI innovations in Brazil. This paper aims to present a comparative investigation between the willingness to adopt cognitive systems (CS) and low expert systems (ES) for OHS professionals in the Brazilian industry for risk assessment management to understand potential adoption behavior. The study adopts a survey based on the UTAUT (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) framework, with 88 OHS professionals from several states of Brazil using a platform for OHS risk assessment. Users were presented with two vignettes, one testing willingness to adopt a Low Expert System for OHS and the other testing willingness to adopt a Cognitive System for OHS. Results were analyzed through Structural Equation Modeling in SmartPLS software and statistical test comparison of the two scenarios. Evidence that the UTAUT score for ES is statistically significantly higher than CS supports that this sample of Industry Professionals, in this context, has less intention to adopt AI Technologies for OHS despite the discussion on the theme. Several factors explain this behavior, from the perception of lack of control, legislation, and other issues that constitute barriers to AI adoption in OHS. Results support the need to advance into Human-Centered AI approaches to design AI-based solutions for the OHS Industry andreinforce UTAUT as an essential theoretical framework for supporting AI studies. We aim to research a gap as a novel research approach by proposing to clearly understand factors to AI adoption for OHS in the industry in Brazil, adopting UTAUT. The industrial context and B2B solution also provide new insights concerning the UTAUT construct's behavior. Moreover, the study offers unique contributions concerning Human-Centered AI and the fear of adopting AI solutions: Theoretical Implications - Willingness of AI adoption increases/decreases when user; Managerial Implications - UTAUT can reduce uncertainty on AI software development; few studies address this research lacune.