22702: Bots in Organizations

Bots, described as agentic information systems (IS) artifacts, are everywhere: on social media spreading false news rapidly and affecting political elections worldwide (Bessi and Ferrara 2016; Martini et al. 2021; Mønsted et al. 2017; Shao et al. 2018), in online communities moderating user generated content and participation (Hukal et al. 2019; Safadi et al. 2021), and more recently on business websites providing a variety of services to customers (Han et al. 2023; Schanke et al. 2021). Whether we like it or not, bots are the new normal and here to stay. As previous work has shown, they can behave ethically or unethically (Salge and Berente 2017) and methodologically speaking, bots can pose challenges to research validity due to the potential confounding effects they introduce (Salge and Karahanna 2018). Following our last three Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) on “Researching Bots in Online Social Networks” at the Academy of Management (AoM) 2022 Annual Meeting in Seattle, on “Bot Theory, Methods, and Ethics” at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Boston, and on “Next Decade Bot Research” at the 2024 Annual Meeting in Chicago, we have acquired significant knowledge about the opportunities and challenges within bot research, particularly as it relates to bot detection on social media, a now mature line of work (see Cresci 2020). Eager to continue enriching discussions and strengthening ties within the AoM community, we propose a new PDW titled “Bots in Organizations.” Through this workshop, we aim to: (1) Present theoretical frameworks that help explain the impact of bots for organizational learning and performance. (2) Discuss the most effective methods for studying bots in firms (e.g., field studies, experiments, simulations, interviews, etc). (3) Explore the human-bot collaboration at the workplace, including psychological effects of integrating bots into structures, workflows, and decision-making processes. (4) Address ethical concerns arising from business bots (e.g., job displacement, privacy concerns) as well as biases in decision-making and how to strive for transparency and fairness in bot usage. As always, this PDW looks to maintain and continue to develop the multidisciplinary community of scholars dedicated to bot research, an interest group we began a few years ago in Seattle.