Personal Assistants for Human Organizations
Abstract
Intelligent software personal assistants are an active research area with the potential to revolutionize the way that human organizations operate, but there has been little research quantifying how they will impact organizational performance or how organizations will or should adapt in response. In this chapter we develop a computational model of the organization to evaluate the impact different proposed assistant abilities have on the behavior and performance of the organization. By varying the organizational structures under consideration, we can identify which abilities are most beneficial, as well as explore how organizations may adapt to best leverage the new technology. The results indicate that the most beneficial abilities for hierarchical organizations are those that improve load balancing through task allocation and failure recovery, while for horizontal organizations the most beneficial abilities are those that improve communication. The results also suggest that software personal assistant technology will facilitate more horizontal organizations.
BibTeX
@incollection{Okamoto-2009-17072,author = {Steven Okamoto and Katia Sycara and Paul Scerri},
title = {Personal Assistants for Human Organizations},
booktitle = {Handbook of Research on Multi-Agent Systems: Semantics and Dynamics of Organizational Models},
publisher = {GI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference},
address = {Hershey, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.},
chapter = {21},
editor = {Virginia Dignum},
year = {2009},
month = {February},
pages = {514 - 540},
keywords = {intelligent software personal assistants, agents, human organizations, organizational performance, computational model},
}