Working around the innovators Non-contestational agonisms in the production of governmental innovation

Santtu Räisänen discusses the discontents of the work of “innovation experts”: certain privileged individuals in organisations who construct and disseminate stories of social problems and their technical solutions. Drawing from an example of personalising welfare service provision using AI, the presentation outlines how the innovator’s work of crafting AI-solvable problems becomes itself a problem for more peripheral actors in the network. The problem demands substantial, informal and undocumented workarounds to sustain the appearance of successful AI innovation.