Inproceedings,
Towards an Employee-Centered Design for Human-AI Collaboration: How Work Design Theory Informs the Design of AI Systems
Pre-ICIS Workshop on the Changing Nature of Work (SIG 11th CNoW), Copenhagen, Denmark, (2022)
Abstract
IT support is under growing pressure to ensure efficient, flexible, and scalable use of digital technologies (Kumbakara, 2008). As a result, technical support staff is affected by monotonous work and work overload (Schmidt et al., 2022). Our research aims to augment the precarious workplace of support agents with artificial intelligence (AI). To incorporate an employee-centered perspective a priori and ensure positive impacts, we propose a framework for combining work design theory (e.g. Demerouti et al., 2001) and design science theory (Peffers et al., 2007, Niehaves & Ortbach 2016). The advances in AI promise to leverage large potential in optimizing and enhancing service processes and workplaces (Huang & Rust, 2018, de Keyser, 2019). Introducing AI into service processes, imply effects on work characteristics (Larivière et al., 2017). By combining human and artificial intelligence we propose hybrid intelligence (Dellermann et al., 2019) as a suitable solution for mitigating the persistent issues of support workers and the possible negative impacts of AI. To a great extent, IS research emphasizes the implied impacts of AI use in workplaces (Verma & Singh 2022, Wang et al., 2020). As such, work design models are widely used to empirically evaluate the impacts of AI design (Sturm & Peters, 2020), but are rarely utilized to substantiate the design of AI-augmented work systems. Only Poser et al. (2022) and Zschech et al. (2021) recently applied such models. The goal of this paper is to overcome the lack of work design in design science research (DSR) for AI-based systems and to steer the development into desired socio-technological configurations. The here presented work is expected to answer : How can work design theory inform the design of AI-augmented workplaces? RQ1 How should a hybrid intelligence system be designed to augment IT support agents’ workplaces by incorporating work design theory?
RQ2 To systematically design the integration of AI, we make use of the DSR paradigm (Peffers et al., 2007). We first interview support agents and utilize the organizing move theory of Pentland (1992) and the technical support work theory of Das (2003) to ensure relevance. Based on a review of the IS literature on work design theories, we then derive a preliminary theoretical framework (Paul & Benito, 2018) RQ1. The framework represents a kernel theory for the development of meta design requirements. Contributing to the second research question, we design and subsequently evaluate the augmentation based on work-related outcomes RQ2.
