EXPLORING CHATBOTS’ USE ACROSS THE DIGITAL ECONOMY By Prof. Pedro Isaias, Universidade Aberta, Portugal and The University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

From Eliza, developed in the 1960’s by Joseph Weizenbaum, to the launch of ChatGPT, by OpenAI, chatbots have witnessed great progress. The evolution of artificial intelligence technology has had imposing repercussions on chatbots’ features and applicability, and their capacity to respond in an emotional manner. Today’s unprecedented use of chatbots is becoming pervasive to several sectors, with applications ranging from content generation to the personalisation of learning, to customer service support to patient follow-up. They have become tools of choice not only for their intuitiveness and empathy, but mostly for their capacity to enhance the efficiency of task completion, their ubiquitousness, scalability, personalisation and automation.  Opposite to all the benefits that can be listed for chatbots’ deployment, exist numerous perils. In particular, chatbots can pose considerable security and privacy concerns, they present a limited ability to address complex questions, they are dependent on predefined scenarios, and they can be overused in situations where human interaction might be preferred by users.  This keynote will examine the use of chatbots across several sectors of society, more specifically, education, business, healthcare, government, exploring both their value and the perils that they pose.

Bio

Prof. Pedro Isaias teaches at Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Portugal and is affiliated with The University of New South Wales (UNSW – Sydney), Australia. Previously he taught at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Before moving to Australia, he served at the Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University) in Lisbon, Portugal, where he was responsible for several courses and director of the master degree program in Management / MBA. Pedro was director of the master degree program in Electronic Commerce and Internet for 10 years.

Prof. Pedro Isaias holds a PhD in Information Management (in the specialty of information and decision systems) from the New University of Lisbon. Author of several books, book chapters, papers and research reports, all in the information systems area, he has headed several conferences and workshops within the mentioned area. He has also been responsible for the scientific coordination of several EU funded research projects. He is also member of the editorial board of several journals and program committee member of several conferences and workshops. Currently he conducts research activity related to MIS in general, and more specifically Learning Technologies, Data Analytics, Business Intelligence, Digital Transformation, e-Business and WWW related areas.