This was a big month on the personal front: I got my British citizenship achieved a key personal goal that I had set for 2025; plus, the kiddo started University. I spent the last 20 or so years wishing for the day when I wouldn’t have to plan work around the school day. I imagined that my productivity would increase dramatically, if I didn’t have to interrupt work because of school runs or after school stuff.

It has been noted by many different people that large language models (LLMs) can, to a certain extent, democratise access to information. Because these models are trained on massive datasets, and use an intuitive prompt-and-response format, they enable users to quickly learn the basics on a given topic or, conversely, do a deep dive on narrow topics of interest. For instance, I have been having an exchange on ChatGPT about “getting into gardening”, which started with general information about things to consider such as light, soil, basic tools, etc… and has now progressed to specific suggestions about what to do at different times of the year, given the area where I live and, even, which local resources and garden centres to visit for inspiration and advice.

This summer was mostly about celebrating several milestones in the kiddo’s life: end of school celebration, leavers’ ball, 18th birthday, A-level results’ day, driving test… But I also enjoyed catching up with friends, reading various fiction and non-fiction books, and swimming lots and lots and lots. Research We finished analysing the first stage of data collection at one of the companies we are working with, for the project on AI agents, and presented the findings to them.

Recently, I was a guest in the podcast “Business Talk”, hosted by Deepak Bhatt. We explored why digital technology is sometimes helpful and sometimes a hindrance, based on the paper “The impact of technology: how features, resources and task demands shape digital well-being”. You can read the blog post about that paper, here. It was an insightful discussion about:

Joss Winn and I delivered a session on “Using Generative AI to Produce and Analysing Qualitative Data”, as part of the SeNSS/ SENSS doctoral training partnership’s Generative AI in research scholar series. In this session, we explored: The role of Generative AI in developing interview questions The potential of Generative AI for conducting interviews Approaches to using Generative AI for analysing interview transcripts…

This was the “I should be more intentional” month. Child 1’s birthday and child 2’s end of school exams made me kick myself for not being more intentional about doing things with them over the years (as opposed to just doing things for them). Then, some pains and aches were stark reminders that I need to be very intentional about stretching and about keeping a good posture at my desk.

The news that Amazon’s Alexa+ has reached 1 million users inspired me to read a paper that has been on my TBR list for quite some time: “The Voice Of Commerce: How Smart Speakers Reshape Digital Content Consumption And Preferences”. This paper, co-authored by Yoonseock Son, Wonseok Oh and Il Im, and published in the journal MIS Quarterly*, explores the impact of smart speakers on the sale of digital content – namely, video on demand (VoD) services.

This week marks ten years since I sat on a panel about sharenting - the practice of parents sharing content about their children online - at a blogging event. The panel was hosted by Monika Roozen, then known for her blog Mum on the Brink, and my talk back then focused on how the data and metadata shared by parents created digital footprints for their children that could follow them for life. 

We know from personal experience that digital technology can shape our wellbeing. On the one hand, it offers speed, convenience, and greater access to services. On the other hand, it can feel cold, confusing, or even overwhelming — especially for people facing challenging life circumstances. What’s less clear, however, is why the same technology can sometimes help and sometimes hinder…

If April was a month of the new beginnings, May was all about gathering speed, as detailed below. On the personal front, the month included a jazz concert, Star Wars’ day, coffee with a friend, lots of fresh asparagus and the kiddo’s last day of school ever (and, thus, my last school drop-off / pick-up). But there was also confirmation that many colleagues will be leaving the University as part of the voluntary leavers scheme, which is really sad (and also worrying).

As AI agents increasingly handle customer service interactions, it's natural to ask: How do users respond when a service failure is caused by an AI agent versus a human one?  A study by Yibo Xie, Zelin Tong, and Zhuorong Wu explored just that. Through a series of experiments, where participants were asked to imagine that they had received a bouquet of wilted flowers, the authors found that…

AI is becoming a common part of online shopping, but are there times when we still prefer human judgement? Research suggests that the answer depends on both the nature of the product and the customer’s certainty about what they want. Some time ago, I reviewed a paper by Fei Jin and Xiaodan Zhang examining when customers would accept an AI recommendation vs a human one.

With growing interest in AI-based service agents, an increasing number of studies are comparing how users perceive interactions with AI versus human agents. Yaqi Chen, Haizhong Wang, Sally Rao Hill and Binglian Li examined user assessment of adverts created by a generative AI agent vs a human one. The details for this paper are: Chen, Y., H. Wang, S. Rao Hill, and B.

My over-riding impression of April is that it was a month for new beginnings: interviews started for the agentic AI project; made inroads into two new papers; visited a University that the kiddo is keen to go to; and got started on a personal project that is really important for me. And, as the nice weather is firmly here, the evening outdoor swims have returned.

Last month, I had the pleasure of joining executives from Verizon, GSMA, and Artefact in London for a panel discussion hosted by Humara and 15gifts, exploring the evolving role of AI agents in sales. Our conversation covered industry pressures, internal resourcing, the nuances of AI in “closed box” vs “open box” problems, and how users perceive AI-powered interactions. If you're curious about where AI is making the biggest impact in sales—and where it might go next—you can catch the full recording below.

When we consider the reasons supporting or hindering adoption of AI, there might be a tendency to focus on rational aspects, namely the trade-off between benefits such as time-savings or enhanced performance, on the one hand, and costs such as learning effort or the consequence of mistakes, on the other. But we are also emotional beings (and not particularly rational, either).

March was a good month. Sure, hay fever is annoying and  it wasn’t fun to deal with a trapped nerve. But there were also many highlights such as running in nice weather, kicking off the SeNSS training series on GenAI in research with my AI literacy session, or joining a panel of AI experts, to discuss the future of sales. 

If you are an academic (including a PhD student) curious about the potential of generative AI (GenAI) in a university context, but not sure where to start, here are some helpful resources. About the technology Research shows that understanding GenAIs’ strengths and weaknesses is crucial to enable a critical approach to its use. So, my first set of recommendations focuses on resources that explain how the technology works.

While I warmly encourage everyone to get familiar with generative AI, I often suggest that they use it mostly for purposes where it doesn’t matter if the answer is correct or not. If one must use it in a context where accuracy matters, then I suggest using it only when we know the answer and can check if it is correct.

Earlier this month, I ran a brief “introduction to generative AI” session for PhD students and post-docs enrolled in the SeNSS/ SENSS doctoral training partnership. Here are the slides used in the session, and the video recording. The session drew on my socio-technical framework for AI literacy. It was just one hour-long so, as you can imagine, there was time for neither detail nor depth.

Study after study after study shows that fewer women than men are using generative AI. Image source The reasons for this AI gender gap are numerous and, to be frank, are not new. Some of the causes mentioned in the emerging literature are: Lack of exposure to generative AI in the workplace: There is still a difference in terms of the…

📣 Funded Early Career Fellowships ESRC is funding early career fellowships, focusing on “how the growing adoption of AI is changing the research landscape…

The decision will end 400 years of the company's letter service, and postboxes will disappear from June.

February was birthday month . And flu month. And full-on teaching month. And start of new projects month. Unfortunately, fitness and blogging took a back seat. Alas, you can't have everything.  I am swimming in the rain... Research The month started with a meeting at the hotel that is the focus of the paper "Stakeholders of the World, Unite!: Hospitality in the time of COVID-19…