Axel Niklasson is a PhD candidate at City, University of London's Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design. He is a Microsoft Research PhD Scholar, and was awarded an internship with Microsoft Research Cambridge in 2022. In 2023, Axel was awarded an AInet Fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD.

Axel's PhD explores the future of AI-assisted team-work. The research both draws on and contributes to scholarship in Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Organisation Studies. The thesis emphasises the role of the organisation in cultivating a sociomaterial understanding of team-work as an entangled, skilled practice that emerges through relations. This equips the analysis to trace how team-work tools and artificial intelligence might actively participate in team-work.

In addition to his academic research, Axel brings over 20 years of industry experience in telecom, tv production and software engineering to inform an explorative and interpretative approach to research.