Exploring Collaborative GenAI Agents in Synchronous Group Settings: Eliciting Team Perceptions and Design Considerations for the Future of Work
This addresses the problem of adapting AI tools for group work in professional settings, offering incremental insights into design considerations for future workplace technologies.
The paper investigated how collaborative generative AI agents can enhance teamwork in synchronous group settings through a study with 25 professionals, finding that well-designed agents can improve problem-solving by challenging groupthink and reducing social friction, but integration depends on perceived fit across individual, team, and organizational factors.
While generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is finding increased adoption in workplaces, current tools are primarily designed for individual use. Prior work established the potential for these tools to enhance personal creativity and productivity towards shared goals; however, we don't know yet how to best take into account the nuances of group work and team dynamics when deploying GenAI in work settings. In this paper, we investigate the potential of collaborative GenAI agents to augment teamwork in synchronous group settings through an exploratory study that engaged 25 professionals across 6 teams in speculative design workshops and individual follow-up interviews. Our workshops included a mixed reality provotype to simulate embodied collaborative GenAI agents capable of actively participating in group discussions. Our findings suggest that, if designed well, collaborative GenAI agents offer valuable opportunities to enhance team problem-solving by challenging groupthink, bridging communication gaps, and reducing social friction. However, teams' willingness to integrate GenAI agents depended on its perceived fit across a number of individual, team, and organizational factors. We outline the key design tensions around agent representation, social prominence, and engagement and highlight the opportunities spatial and immersive technologies could offer to modulate GenAI influence on team outcomes and strike a balance between augmentation and agency.