Augmented Facilitation: Designing a multi-modal Conversational Agent for Group Ideation

Human facilitators face the challenge to structure and collect relevant insights from collaborative creative work sessions, which can suffer if they face a high workload. Hence, for effective value co-creation in organizational ideation we suggest an facilitation augmentation with a conversational agent (CA). CAs have the ability to support respective collaborative work by documenting and analyzing unstructured data. Following the design science research paradigm, and based on the literature about facilitation and human-AI collaboration, we derive design principles to develop a CA prototype that collects ideas from a group ideation session and displays them back in a structured (multi-modal) manner. We evaluate the CA by conducting four focus groups. Key findings show that the CA successfully distills and enriches information. Our study contributes to understanding the role of CA in augmenting facilitation and it provides guidance for practice on how to integrate these technologies in group meetings