The Role of Emotions in Human-AI Collaboration

Because AI has distinct abilities that enable the automation of tasks that usually require human intelligence, it can affect various emotions ranging from excitement about efficiency gains to the fear of being replaced. At the same time, emotions constitute key drivers of employee behavior and thus may determine whether and how AI users collaborate with AI. We raise the question of what AI users consider important in the light of human-AI collaboration and how these aspects relate to their emotional attitudes towards this technology. We address this research question by collecting longitudinal data regarding the AI implementation in three companies. We use qualitative coding to identify important aspects of human-AI collaboration from semi-structured interviews conducted at different stages of the AI implementation. Moreover, we use voice analysis to measure the interviewees’ emotional state while speaking about different aspects of human-AI collaboration