AI-Based Digital Assistants : Opportunities, Threats, and Research Perspectives

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Mädche, Alexander ; Legner, Christine ; Benlian, Alexander ; Berger, Benedikt ; Gimpel, Henner ; Hess, Thomas ; Hinz, Oliver ; Morana, Stefan ; Söllner, Matthias:
AI-Based Digital Assistants : Opportunities, Threats, and Research Perspectives.
In: Business & Information Systems Engineering. Vol. 61 (2019) Issue 4 . - pp. 535-544.
ISSN 1867-0202
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-019-00600-8

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming omnipresent; it permeates our work and private lives in many areas. A key area of application is AI-based digital assistants, which are now becoming available in large numbers and a wide variety of usage scenarios. Research into AI-based digital assistants has a long history, dating back to Joseph Weizenbaum’s well-known ELIZA in 1966. In parallel, global technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Amazon have been working intensively for decades on advancing AI-based digital assistants and have recently made them suitable for the mass market. Empowered by recent advances in AI, these assistants are becoming part of our daily lives. We are observing the ever-growing usage of various digital assistants, for instance, voice-based assistants such as Amazon Alexa, or text-based assistants (chatbots), such as those embedded in Facebook Messenger. It is foreseen that AI-based digital assistants will become a key element in th! e f uture of work. Today’s enterprise communication platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams already provide many different bot types to augment work, and Gartner (2019) predicts that by 2021, one-quarter of all digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant daily. This discussion section follows a panel at the Interna- tional Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik in March 2019 in Siegen (WI 2019) and presents different perspectives on AI-based digital assistants. It sheds light on (1) application areas, opportunities, and threats as well as (2) the BISE community’s roles in the field of AI-based digital assistants. The different authors’ contributions emphasize that BISE, as a socio-technical discipline, must address the designs and the behaviors of AI-based digital assistants as well as their interconnections. They have identified multiple research opportunities to deliver descriptive and prescriptive knowledge, thereby actively shaping future interact ions between users and AI-based digital assistants. We trust that these inputs will lead BISE researchers to take active roles and to contribute an IS perspective to the academic and the political discourse about AI-based digital assistants.