Beyond Behavioral Nudging: AI Tools for Boosting Workplace Sustainability

Organizations striving to meet sustainability goals often rely on behavioral nudges – defaults, incentives, and reminders – to influence employee behavior. While effective in the short term, these approaches can generate unintended consequences, including dependency, disengagement, and limited long-term impact. This article presents a practitioner-oriented framework for combining nudging with cognitive boosting to support more durable forms of workplace sustainability. Advances in AI-enabled workplace systems allow these approaches to be implemented through personalized, context-sensitive interventions at scale. A decision framework is provided for when to use nudges, boosts, or both, and is complemented by design principles and implementation constraints for AI-enabled systems, providing actionable guidance for managers.