Defining Bots in an Enterprise Context

Bots, Virtual Assistants and Virtual Agents are well known in a personal environment. Technologies like “Apple Siri” or “Amazon Alexa” serve as digital assistants to enhance both accessibility and productivity. Yet, these technologies have to play with different rules in the enterprise context. Workflows within a digital workplace are different from what consumers are used to in a private surrounding. This concludes into the need for a definition for Enterprise Bots. In this short paper, we aim to provide insights in the current state of literature in this area and derive a definition for Enterprise Bots that is reusable by scholars and practitioners. Furthermore, we propose a research model based on the decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior, that both validates this definition and allows further insights into the topic of Enterprise Bots. Finally, we conclude by testing this model in a survey at a multi-national company and find that 10 of 12 used constructs are highly reliable.

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