Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for boosting organizational efficiency and automating tasks. While not originally designed for complex cognitive processes, recent efforts have further extended to employ LLMs in activities such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making. In business processes, such abilities could be invaluable for leveraging on the massive corpora LLMs have been trained on for gaining deep understanding of such processes. In this work, we plant the seeds for the development of a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to reason about causal and process perspectives of business operations. We refer to this view as Causally-augmented Business Processes (BP^C). The core of the benchmark comprises a set of BP^C related situations, a set of questions about these situations, and a set of deductive rules employed to systematically resolve the ground truth answers to these questions. Also with the power of LLMs, the seed is then instantiated into a larger-scale set of domain-specific situations and questions. Reasoning on BP^C is of crucial importance for process interventions and process improvement. Our benchmark, accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm/BPC, can be used in one of two possible modalities: testing the performance of any target LLM and training an LLM to advance its capability to reason about BP^C.

Motor skills, especially fine motor skills like handwriting, play an essential role in academic pursuits and everyday life. Traditional methods to teach these skills, although effective, can be time-consuming and inconsistent. With the rise of advanced technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, there is increasing interest in automating such teaching processes using these technologies, via human-robot and human-computer interactions. In this study, we examine the potential of a virtual AI teacher in emulating the techniques of human educators for motor skill acquisition. We introduce an AI teacher model that captures the distinct characteristics of human instructors. Using a Reinforcement Learning environment tailored to mimic teacher-learner interactions, we tested our AI model against four guiding hypotheses, emphasizing improved learner performance, enhanced rate of skill acquisition, and reduced variability in learning outcomes. Our findings, validated on synthetic learners, revealed significant improvements across all tested hypotheses. Notably, our model showcased robustness across different learners and settings and demonstrated adaptability to handwriting. This research underscores the potential of integrating Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning models with robotics in revolutionizing the teaching of critical motor skills.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are likely to play a prominent role in future AI-augmented business process management systems (ABPMSs) catering functionalities across all system lifecycle stages. One such system's functionality is Situation-Aware eXplainability (SAX), which relates to generating causally sound and yet human-interpretable explanations that take into account the process context in which the explained condition occurred. In this paper, we present the SAX4BPM framework developed to generate SAX explanations. The SAX4BPM suite consists of a set of services and a central knowledge repository. The functionality of these services is to elicit the various knowledge ingredients that underlie SAX explanations. A key innovative component among these ingredients is the causal process execution view. In this work, we integrate the framework with an LLM to leverage its power to synthesize the various input ingredients for the sake of improved SAX explanations. Since the use of LLMs for SAX is also accompanied by a certain degree of doubt related to its capacity to adequately fulfill SAX along with its tendency for hallucination and lack of inherent capacity to reason, we pursued a methodological evaluation of the quality of the generated explanations. To this aim, we developed a designated scale and conducted a rigorous user study. Our findings show that the input presented to the LLMs aided with the guard-railing of its performance, yielding SAX explanations having better-perceived fidelity. This improvement is moderated by the perception of trust and curiosity. More so, this improvement comes at the cost of the perceived interpretability of the explanation.

These opportunities require a significant shift in the way the BPMS operates and interacts with its operators(both human and digital agents). While traditional BPMSs encode pre-defined flows and rules, an ABPMS is able to reason about the current state of the process(or across several processes) to determine a course of action that improves the performance of the process. To fully exploit this capability, the ABPMS needs a degree of autonomy. Naturally, this autonomy needs to be framed by operational assumptions, goals, and environmental constraints. Also, ABPMSs need to engage conversationally with human agents, they need to explain their actions, and they need to recommend adaptations or improvements in the way the process is performed. This manifesto outlined a number of research challenges that need to be overcome to realize systems that exhibit these characteristics.