toward an understanding of the impact of software personal assistants on human organizations
Intelligent software personal assistants for human organizations are an active research area within the multiagent community. However, while many capabilities for these software personal assistants are imagined or already developed, there has been no quantification of how an organization's performance is improved by software personal assistants. Moreover, while intuitively organizations will adapt to take advantage of the new technology, there has been no work looking at how organizations should or will change in response to the new technology. This paper presents a first step toward addressing this oversight. Specifically, a computational model of the working of an organization and how software personal assistants will affect that organization is developed that allows effects of software personal assistants to be modeled. By varying the potential capabilities of the software personal assistants and the structure of the organization, we can explore the impact of the technology. Our results show that managing task contingencies can greatly improve organizational performance by as much as 45\%.
personal software assistants organizational design