A Platform for AI-Enabled Real-Time Feedback to Promote Digital Collaboration

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of AI-enabled real-time feedback on group dynamics and individual behavior. While feedback interventions have been employed for several years to trigger behavioral change, the lack of instantaneous feedback and the required infrastructure are limiting the widespread use of these interventions. The methodology we describe offers immediate pointers to participants through the use of the Meeting Mediator (MM), an online intervention tool that shows the conversational balance of participants and offers immediate feedback to team members, with limited intermediation of the researchers. Both the experimental group—exposed to the MM—and the control group completed two tasks, which involved making a series of complex decisions as a group in the form of two moral reasoning tasks. Results confirmed that participants exposed to the MM experienced approximately twice as large of an increase in self-assessed dominance over the control group as those who were exposed only once. This effect is also present on repeated exposures, and becomes more pronounced with each subsequent exposure. When participants were exposed to the MM either in the first task or in the second task, their performance increased, though we found no positive impact when groups were exposed several times to it. Overall, this experiment demonstrates the benefits of using AI-enabled tools to promote effective collaboration and sustainable growth in corporate settings and online education environments, which requires the development of critical thinking and self-reflection skills.