ABSTRACT. A personalized customer approach in marketing offers many benefits to customers and organizations. With chatbots, personalized marketing could reach the next level as they gather, analyze, and use customer data while communicating with them. Based on qualitative data collected with a start-up in the field, this in-depth case study evaluates the potential of chatbots from an industry perspective, identifying significant benefits, challenges, and future directions that organizations can use to engage in chatbots in marketing. Our main results indicate that chatbots offer optimized customer approaches that are less intrusive and provide a better identification and segmentation of customers. We also see that organizations should avoid bombarding customers with advertising messages because the chatbot enables them to approach the customer directly, so use this communication channel wisely. In the future, chatbots can optimize access to a wholesome customer experience that fits customers’ preferences.

ABSTRACT. The nature of education and training have dramatically changed due in large part to the advancement of technology. These advancements require changes in the skillsets of the learner. Research and history have shown that continuing to hire talents to fill gaps of knowledge and ad-hoc fixes are not typically enough to keep up with rapid innovation and change. This conceptual paper provides an innovative conceptualization of how to capitalize on the value of emerging AI technologies for education and training. We propose a holistic approach to augment AI and human capabilities in a competency-based learning environment. We argue that to successfully create an AI-based augmented training system, the fit between the learning task and the AI technology as well as the human-AI augmentation must be considered. These areas are explained in the specific context of competency-based learning.

ABSTRACT. With digitalization disrupting organizations every day, the necessary skills to get a job in modern societies are changing rapidly. Individuals and educational institutions seek knowledge of what industry demands in terms of hard- and soft-skills to plan their next step in having these skills in their personal or educational portfolio. To find out which hard- and soft-skills play a key role in finding IT personnel jobs, we employ a text mining approach on job advertisement data and generate a framework for IT personnel jobs. After doing some standard preprocessing steps, we use topic modeling to generate our results and map those with the IT personnel framework. Our results show that three competencies’ fields are relevant for IT personnel jobs, and hard- and soft-skills play both a major role in those. Depending on which competencies field one wants to explore, we highlighted the most necessary skills that may play a decisive role when applying for a job in that position. Our findings contribute to the stream of literature equipping both educational institutions and individuals with recommendations of the skills to include and focus on regarding IT personnel.

ABSTRACT. The extant literatures on the resource-based view and knowledge-based view of firms are silent about how IT human capital investment deviation -i.e., underinvestment and overinvestment in IT human capital -implicate firm outcomes. Anchoring our study in the Red Queen competition theory and the theoretical perspectives flowing from the organization resource slack literature, we examine the relationship between IT human capital investment deviation and firm performance. In particular, we hypothesize that IT human capital overinvestment and IT human capital underinvestment are associated with increased and decreased firm performance respectively. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 715,652 firm observations over 9 years. We find a positive relationship between IT human capital overinvestment and firm performance. We do not find evidence for our prediction that IT human capital underinvestment is associated with firm performance losses. The findings of the study have implications for the IT human capital literature.

ABSTRACT. This work in progress builds on studies within the engineering higher education literature which detail the ways in which the racialized experiences of underrepresented and minoritized (URM) doctoral students (i.e., Black, Indigenous, and Latino) relate to their future career goals. The goal of this study is to examine this relationship among information technology (I.T.) students when compared to their engineering, and computer science peers. In our preliminary analyses, detailed below, we focus on doctoral students studying mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, in phase two of this work (not shown) we will extend it to doctoral students in information technology (I.T.) fields. Drawing on the results of three national surveys, we investigate the similarities and differences that may exist between eight hundred and forty-seven (n=847) doctoral students across three constructs: career trajectories, mental and physical health, and racial activism. Findings suggest that the career plans vary significantly between URM and non-URM doctoral students and that URM doctoral students in computer science are more i) open to pursuing careers in the non-profit and K-12 education sectors; ii) likely to experience higher levels of race-based stress and lower physical health; and, iii) active in combatting racial inequities in their discipline. In the next phase of our analyses, we will identify I.T. survey respondents within our sample and compare their career outcomes to their computer science and engineering peers.

ABSTRACT. Positive IT identity is the extent to which an individual views the use of IT as integral to his or her sense of self. The extant literature on the construct has described how users’ beliefs about IT usage impact their IT identity resulting in both rich and lean forms of IT usage behaviors. Less understood are the psychological processes that lead to the formation of IT identity. The primary question addressed by this study is “how does IT identity develop?” To answer this question, the study draws on self-extension theory from the marketing literature and self-expansion theory from the social psychological literature to show that positive IT identity develops as a result of two distinct strategies. While self–expansion motivates the development of emotional attachment to IT, self-extension primarily motivates the development of psychological ownership of IT. It is thorough both these motivational states that individuals are able to positively identify with IT.

ABSTRACT. What can we do to address the rising numbers of people suffering from mental health problems facing the lack of mental health professionals? This study uses 15 qualitative expert interviews to identify six realistic application scenarios for artificial intelligence in mental health that reduce mental health professionals’ workload and improve treatment. We classify the application scenarios concerning the type of intelligence they embed (mechanical, analytical, emotional) and the type of task they support (automation, decision support, engagement) to assess their implementation readiness and success. Based on this classification, we develop four application scenarios with the potential for immediate implementation and two possible future directions. Our results contribute to the research stream of artificial intelligence in general and in mental health.

ABSTRACT. Digital nudging is omnipresent in users’ daily lives and con-stantly influences decisions in digital choice environments that require users to make decisions, such as web-based forms or mobile apps. It uses interface design elements and aims to guide users' behavior in specific directions. So far, there is quite a lot of research in that stream, whereby each article focuses on one specific context in which digital nudging is applied. To assist researchers and practitioners that aim to study or design information systems, we provide an overview of existent research in that stream. Following the grounded-theory method, we categorize 88 publications and reveal ten forms and five contexts of digital nudging. We also provide an overview of relationships be-tween forms of digital nudging and their contexts. Our find-ings contribute to digital nudging research by offering an in-depth and structured overview of existing research and future research directions.

ABSTRACT. The new capabilities that emerged with artificial intelligence also target healthcare settings. Nevertheless, they carry potential benefits and challenges that need to be addressed appropriately. In this paper, we mapped the current status of scientific debate on two key regulation aspects of AI in healthcare: the objects of regulation and the affected actors. Data-related issues are the most researched, such as collection, storage, and privacy. In addition, nearly half of the papers targeted policymakers with challenges, comparative analysis, and governance models. Based on these results, we propose a scheme to organize these aspects and discuss implications for AI management, policymaking, and research in this field.

ABSTRACT. Social media platforms are sometimes used for sharing missing persons appeals and disseminating information about missing person cases, which ensures wide distribution. Previous research regarding the effectiveness of social media based publicity has mainly focused on the use of Twitter (Solymosi et al., 2020). However, missing person appeals are also frequently distributed on Facebook. In this paper, we explored how people engage with missing persons appeals on Facebook and Twitter. We manually web scraped 413 missing person appeals distributed on Twitter and Facebook. Variables collected were missing persons’ age, gender, ethnicity, region as well as engagement metrics (e.g., retweets, shares). Overall, the public shared more appeals when they were distributed on Twitter than on Facebook. We found no effect of missing persons’ ethnicity on engagement levels on both platforms. These results are discussed in relation to shareworthiness and social media strategies for agencies releasing appeals on social media.

ABSTRACT. To counteract the increasing number of people showing symptoms of depressive disorders since the outbreak of COVID-19, among others, the WHO suggests using social media more intensively to stay in contact and receive positive messages. However, existing literature indicates that this can have the opposite effect. Based on social comparison theory and technostress literature, we examine the impact of the constant confrontation with the overly optimistic presented lifestyle of social media influencers on Instagram on depression. Our quantitative study (N=191) based on structural equitation modeling indicates that influencers' presented lifestyle has a substantial positive indirect effect on depression mediated through negative emotions. In contrast, positive self-esteem can help to reduce depression. We contribute to technostress literature, research on social comparison, and mental health research.

ABSTRACT. According to social network research, network actors’ benefits from being structurally embedded in a social network are not uniform but depend on the actors’ specific network positions. This study evaluates whether users who occupy specific positions in a microblog follower network receive information that diffuses through mention and repost ties in the associated microblog faster than users who do not occupy such positions. Specifically, we focus on two network positions related to structural capital: outdegree centrality and structural hole closure. To explore this assumption, we conducted a regression analysis with the help of a large dataset that quantifies the diffusion of news and rumors about the discovery of the Higgs-boson particle on Twitter. Our study reveals that in microblogs, the two aforementioned network positions related to structural capital are associated with faster information reception velocity in microblogs. These findings indicate that network positions typically attributed to structural capital in other social network areas also yield benefits in the context of microblogs. According to our findings, microblog users should build a large network of followed users, preferably from disjunct network clusters.