Designing Anthropomorphic Enterprise Conversational Agents

The increasing capabilities of conversational agents (CAs) offer manifold opportunities to assist users in a variety of tasks. In an organizational context, particularly their potential to simulate a human-like interaction via natural language currently attracts attention both at the customer interface as well as for internal purposes, often in the form of chatbots. Emerging experimental studies on CAs look into the impact of anthropomorphic design elements, so-called social cues, on user perception. However, while these studies provide valuable prescriptive knowledge of selected social cues, they neglect the potential detrimental influence of the limited responsiveness of present-day conversational agents. In practice, many CAs fail to continuously provide meaningful responses in a conversation due to the open nature of natural language interaction, which negatively influences user perception and often led to CAs being discontinued in the past. Thus, designing a CA that provides a human-like interaction experience while minimizing the risks associated with limited conversational capabilities represents a substantial design problem. This study addresses the aforementioned problem by proposing and evaluating a design for a CA that offers a human-like interaction experience while mitigating negative effects due to limited responsiveness. Through the presentation of the artifact and the synthesis of prescriptive knowledge in the form of a nascent design theory for anthropomorphic enterprise CAs, this research adds to the growing knowledge base for designing human-like assistants and supports practitioners seeking to introduce them into their organizations.