24779: From Tool to Team Member: Communicative AI’s (Perceived) Agency in a Teamwork Setting (session 26299)

Intelligent conversational agents, or communicative AIs (commAI), have changed the role of technology from mediating organizational communication to being an active social subject taking part in it. Most studies focus on one-on-one commAI (such as ChatGPT) which leaves their role in team context unexplored. This research focuses on human- machine group communication by empirically studying the sociomaterial imbrication of commAI’s agency and human perceptions of it in teamwork. This qualitative study is a combination of experimental and phenomenological research designs and is based on data from group workshops (N=10, 3–6 research subjects in each group). In the workshops, participants chatted with an LLM-based commAI trained to support creative task-oriented teamwork, followed by a reflexive discussion. Our analysis reveals that the actualization of commAI’s agency is a dynamic interplay between aspects related to the individual, social, and technical dimensions of the group conversation. Most notably, the technological frames and expectations of the human members as well as the perceived limitations of human competence and AI capabilities shape how human and AI agencies are viewed. Furthermore, the commAI’s agency becomes visible as its presence shapes the conversational flow and evokes reflective thoughts of the human users’ own expertise and assumptions about AI.

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