Signal Building and Governing AI Systems: Advancing Social Workers' Roles across the Technology Industry, Human Service Organizations, and Policy Institutions

Summary

Nari Yoo, Daphne Watkins, Brian Perron, Jessica Kane, and Matthew Smith published a paper on arXiv (cs.CY) on August 4, 2026, arguing that AI is moving the technology sector into domains social work has long served, including crisis response, mental health care, benefits administration, vocational rehabilitation, and child welfare. The authors note that social workers meet technology as users of tools, subjects in datasets, and first responders to deployed systems, yet study these systems from outside the settings where decisions are made. The paper introduces standard roles on technology product teams and the decisions each controls, reviews AI-era technology disciplines alongside relevant social work scholarship, and identifies five groups of technology decision roles social workers can hold spanning the technology industry, human service organizations, and policy institutions: product, governance, organizational technology leadership, grantee collaboration, and policy work, with product management as the primary example. The authors set the nine competencies of the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards against product manager tasks to show where MSW training already teaches the methods the role requires, then specify the technical understanding these roles need, extend the profession's technology ethics from use to deployment, and close with a research agenda for the profession's technology workforce.