I’m thrilled to announce the arrival of a new pre-print: “Acceptance of AI-Based Meeting Tools: Psychological Safety as a Foundation for Smart Collaboration.” This paper looks at survey information to assess what factors or characteristics influence acceptance of AI-based meeting tools in the workplace. Here’s a summary of what we found, from the discussion:
Unless team members feel safe taking risks and feel valued for their unique abilities, they are unlikely to see the benefits of smart meeting tools nor consider them as easy to use. Savvy managers (and vendors) will recognize that building teams with psychological safety is the first step towards the engaged use of smart meeting tools. As a result, managers (and vendors) must encourage and promote psychologically safe teams, then show how these tools can enhance teams’ culture and performance. This is essentially a safety first, productivity second approach to persuasion.
It is also essential to help teams incrementally use the tools in ways that contribute to psychological safety. For example, AI meeting assistants can be used in many ways and for all meetings. By experimenting with one or two functions first of AI meeting assistant in limited types or amounts of meetings, team members are more likely to understand the implications of the tools on team culture.
–Cardon, Fleischmann, Carradini, Getchell, Stapp, & Aritz (2023)
And here’s the abstract:
Smart (AI-based) meeting tools are increasingly available for professionals to use during and after online meetings. The technological affordances of these tools hold promise for better team communication and collaboration. This study emerged from a simple premise: psychological safety influences key factors in technology acceptance, including performance expectancy and effort expectancy. Three surveys involving 509 frequent users of online work meetings were conducted to explore attitudes toward three forms of meeting tools: captions, recorded meetings, and AI meeting assistants. Results showed that psychological safety influences performance expectancy and effort expectancy. The study concludes with recommendations for future research and practice in terms of the fundamental importance of psychological safety for smart collaboration.
–Cardon, Fleischmann, Carradini, Getchell, Stapp, & Aritz (2023)
I’m always excited to see collaborative work out in the world, and so it is with this one: I’m happy to see this one leave the nest.