Impact assessment of software agents to organizations

Abstract

Intelligent software personal assistants for human organizations are an active research area within the multi-agent 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 project presents a first step toward addressing this oversight by measuring the potential capabilities of epassist which is a Personal Assistant or Agent' that will execute tasks on ones behalf on request. The impact of agents to organizations has been explored in this project by implementing this agent tool in three branch offices of this organization and through various scientific methods, parameters analyzed with very impressive results. Preliminary results show that managing task contingencies can greatly reduce cognitive load besides improve organizational task performance significantly. Although the system provides a number of automated functions, the overall framework is highly user-centric in its support for human needs, responsiveness to human inputs, and adaptability to users working style and preferences.