Hi, I am the new digital co-worker : A qualitative study on employees within the public sector’s expectations and experiences of implementing AI chatbots

Sammanfattning: Chatbots are becoming increasingly common within both private and public sectors as they are implemented for organizations to provide service at any time. Within related research on the topic, the focus lies on the private sector and chatbot users, while the research on how chatbot implementation may affect the employees within the public sector is lacking. The focus of this thesis is therefore to provide more information about chatbot implementation within the public sector. More specifically, to understand how the employees expect and experience that the implementation of chatbots can affect them in their work and ways to communicate information.  In this study, eight semi-structured interviews with a duration of one hour each were conducted, where the interviewees were employees in municipalities and universities who are working with chatbot implementation. The results show that the interviewees expect that there will be a decreased workload and increased time to work on more complex tasks. However, the time that is liberated because of the chatbot needs to be reinvested into its upkeep, and the interviewees experience that new tasks are added to fill that time, indicating that their expectations are unfulfilled.  The results also show that the interviewees expect the chatbot to increase their availability and that it will be a new, less formal way to communicate information. It is experienced that people can contact them any time through the chatbot. They experience that the chatbot uses a simple language to communicate information and that it presents information like it would be presented by a human.