In the shift towards human-centered manufacturing, our two-year longitudinal study investigates the real-world impact of deploying Cognitive Assistants (CAs) in factories. The CAs were designed to facilitate knowledge sharing among factory operators. Our investigation focused on smartphone-based voice assistants and LLM-powered chatbots, examining their usability and utility in a real-world factory setting. Based on the qualitative feedback we collected during the deployments of CAs at the factories, we conducted a thematic analysis to investigate the perceptions, challenges, and overall impact on workflow and knowledge sharing. Our results indicate that while CAs have the potential to significantly improve efficiency through knowledge sharing and quicker resolution of production issues, they also introduce concerns around workplace surveillance, the types of knowledge that can be shared, and shortcomings compared to human-to-human knowledge sharing. Additionally, our findings stress the importance of addressing privacy, knowledge contribution burdens, and tensions between factory operators and their managers.

Cognitive assistants (CA) are chatbots that provide context-aware support to human workers in knowledge-intensive tasks. Traditionally, cognitive assistants respond in specific ways to predefined user intents and conversation patterns. However, this rigidness does not handle the diversity of natural language well. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), powering large language models (LLM) such as GPT-4, Llama2, and Gemini, could enable CAs to converse in a more flexible, human-like manner. However, the additional degrees of freedom may have unforeseen consequences, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where accuracy is crucial. As a preliminary step to assessing the potential of using LLMs in these contexts, we conducted a user study comparing an LLM-based CA to an intent-based system regarding interaction efficiency, user experience, workload, and usability. This revealed that LLM-based CAs exhibited better user experience, task completion rate, usability, and perceived performance than intent-based systems, suggesting that switching NLP techniques should be investigated further.

ChatGPT is catching the world by storm! My friends are constantly sending me examples of the fantastic and unexpected things that ChatGPT has done. ChatGPT reached over a million users in just five days. I am not surprised at how good ChatGPT has become. But I am amazed at the incredible growth of the awareness of these tools in the last two months. And that has encouraged me to help everyone understand how ChatGPT and large language models will impact your overall knowledge strategy and your ability to build cognitive assistants for all your knowledge workers.

We live in a world fundamentally transformed by our own creations. Once imagined only in science fiction, artificial intelligence now powers much of the technology we interact with every day--from smart home devices to cognitive assistants to media recommenders. While subtle by design, the impact of AI is far-reaching. The field of education is no less affected by these technologies. AI shows up in instructional chatbots, personalized learning systems and administrative tools.

Sales and business development are suffering and AI-powered sales performance solutions can help. So-called propensity models can identify which customers are most likely to buy a product or service from a company, says Dr Tom Davenport, president's distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, Massachusetts. These models can help those working in sales improve their productivity and effectiveness, by showing them which customers to prioritise. "For brands, having insight into what their customers think and want has always been a key priority, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made this understanding even more critical," says Chris Colley, principal of customer experience at Medallia. But he notes, at the same time, collecting data on what customers think has become more challenging.

We demonstrate an embodied cognitive agent that helps scientists visualize and analyze exo-planets and their host stars. The prototype is situated in a room equipped with a large display, microphones, cameras, speakers, and pointing devices. Users communicate with the agent via speech, gestures, and combinations thereof, and it responds by displaying content and generating synthesized speech.

From chips to smart phones to public and private clouds, industrial strength "cognition as a service" is beginning to appear at all scales in business and society. Furthermore, in the age of zettabytes on the way to yottabytes, the designers, engineers, and managers of future smart systems will depend on cognition as a service. Cognition as a service can help unlock the mysteries of big data and ultimately boost the creativity and productivity of professionals and their teams, the productive output of industries and organizations, as well as the GDP (gross domestic product) of regions and nations. In this and the next decade, cognition as a service will allow us to reimage work practices, augmenting and scaling expertise to transform professions, industries, and regions. Gartner, the technology industry analyst firm, projects that by 2017, 10 percent of all computers will be learning (Plummer 2013).

This article contains the reports of the AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents symposia, which were held November 12-14, 2015 in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from five of the symposia. Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a broad community encompassing robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, and social science. In this meeting, we sought to bring together and strengthen the subset of the HRI community that is focused on the AI challenges inherent to HRI.

On Monday, at the 2017 IBM InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, IBM unveiled a new, cloud-based cognitive assistant that it said will better help IT professionals secure endpoints like smartphones, laptops, and IoT products. The assistant, which is powered by IBM Watson, is formally known as the MaaS360 Advisor and is part of IBM's MaaS360 unified endpoint management (UEM) platform offered through the IBM Cloud. According to an IBM press release, "The MaaS360 Advisor will use machine learning to analyze devices on the network and recommend policies, patches and customized best practices to better manage and protect them." Over 80% of companies are already using AI and cognitive solutions to more effectively insight the data collected from their endpoints, according to the IBM Mobile Vision 2020 Study, so it makes sense that they could be using similar tools to protect those same endpoints. In its release, IBM said that nearly half of employees are using three devices or more to get work done every week.

For many, the holiday season is a time of reflection, both from a personal and professional standpoint. I won't get too deep into politics and pop culture, but can't reflect on 2016 without thinking about the 2016 US presidential election and the Chicago Cub's finally winning the world series after 108 years. In my professional life I recall the challenges faced and overcome, the triumphs and even missed opportunities. Hopefully there were more triumphs than missed opportunities in your professional life, but reflecting on both can help prepare and potentially create your own opportunities in the new year – particularly if you work in digital commerce. If you're a digital commerce professional, either an online retailer or a B2B seller, last year saw a few milestones that are sure to impact your business in 2017 and beyond.