On Conversational Agents in Information Systems Research: Analyzing the Past to Guide Future Work.
Stephan Diederich, Alfred Brendel, Lutz Maria Kolbe · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2019
Conversational agents (CA), i.e. software that interacts with its usersthrough natural language, are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday lifeas technological advances continue to significantly drive their capabilities. CAexhibit the potential to support and collaborate with humans in a multitude oftasks and can be used for innovation and automation across a variety of businessfunctions, such as customer service or marketing and sales. Parallel to theincreasing popularity in practice, IS researchers have engaged in studying avariety of aspects related to CA in the last few years, applying different researchmethods and producing different types of theories. In this paper, we review 36studies to assess the status quo of CA research in IS, identify gaps regarding boththe studied aspects as well as applied methods and theoretical approaches, andpropose directions for future work in this research area.