<p>Philosophers of work and others have held a variety of views on what ‘work’ is. AI is likely to have considerable impacts on work, and so conceptual clarity is necessary in order to effectively tackle the various important challenges that AI presents to work. This paper argues that a pluralistic account of work (where there are multiple distinct characterisations), rather than a typical monistic account (where there only one characterisation), provides considerable and useful conceptual clarity in considering the impacts of AI and automation on work. There are, at minimum, eight distinct and useful characterisations of work relevant to AI, automation, and work. I title them: energy work, agreement work, income work, service work, economic work, good work, volunteer work, and goal work. Additionally, using such a pluralistic account of work is shown to be advantageous in considering potential solutions to the problems presented by AI and automation. As the first pluralistic account of work presented in the literature, this article encourages further application of work pluralism to areas other than AI’s impacts, and welcomes further conceptual refinement.</p>