ABSTRACT

AIA is a concept for an intelligent, digital assistant that is designed to support every employee situation-dependent, individually and proactively in the field of coordination, communication and data management at the digital workplace within 5-10 years.

FOCUS

A highly complex system as an intelligent digital assistant can‘t be implemented immediately and serve all the stakeholders, but develops step by step.

We focus on the first stage in our thesis, which could be achieved within the next 5-10 years and refers to the already existing highly complex problems, processes and tasks within a company (Smith/Burke 2019; Walker 2018).

PROBLEM & OPPORTUNITY

large amounts of data, multiple meetings and constant information exchange......Digitalization makes our work more efficient but also more complex and many new challenges emerge in everyday office life.

Interview

With our cooperation partner Haufe Group in Freiburg, we conducted a series of interviews with employees from different teams and departments in order to find out what problems they encounter in their daily work.

Key Solutions

The problems found in interviews can be categorized into 3 areas: Data management, coordination, communication. According to the problems, the potential areas for a digital assistant system can also be grouped into the same three categories.

The questions came up quickly: Could the development of new technologies, such as Big Data, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing provide a solution to reduce the complexity of everyday work? How will these technologies structure thousands of small tools and cross-platforms clearly in the future?

CONCEPT

The digital assistant for our concept is called "AIA", the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligent Assistant.

AIA will be able to support each employee individually through independent learning, which depends on the situation and environment. A scenario in the context of a meeting and a visualization of an exemplary application will show which tasks AIA could take over in 5-10 years and how the interaction between AIA and humans could look like.

Furthermore, our thesis illuminates the requirements for a successful implementation, as well as chances and risks that arise from the use of the digital assistant.

Requirement

To implement an assistant system, the basic technical requirements must be met first. Nowadays users must actively request the machine to deliver an output, but what if when the machine could act independently and support users actively. Through multiple communication channels and the combination with Big Data and AI, it is possible for the machine to proactively interact with the users and deliver the appropriate information. Besides, AIA has to predominate the corresponding structures in the company. Political and social agreements have also to be done.

Functionality

In the future, AIA will act as a mediator between hardware and software. AIA has two sides. In the background AIA collects, connects and evaluates the data. The foreground processes include all processes in which the user interacts with AIA and they depend on the user, the environment, the current situation and the content to be transmitted. In the beginning AIA interacts with each person in a very similar way. But the longer AIA "gets to know" the user, the more individually the system adapts to the user's behavior, preferences and habits.

Use Case

To express how the interaction between AIA and humans could look like, we made a visualization with the corresponding "Main Features" of AIA. The animation shows the interactions of four different people with AIA in the context of meeting organization and how AIA reacts to different situations in different ways.

Opportunities, risks, principles

In this concept, we have tried to list advantages and disadvantages and to establish principles to provide an overview of future developments. These could serve as a stimulus to discussions for the future.