A Literature Review on the Employees’ Perspective on Anthropomorphism in Generative AI Assistants in the Workplace

With generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools progressing in their capabilities and application in professional contexts, organizations and employees are tasked to adapt to this development. Especially GenAI’s ability to appear human-like enables innovative use cases and can engage the users more naturally, going so far as to even act as an artificial employee. However, while this seems desirable from a company’s perspective, it naturally also heavily impacts the employees. To understand how this is perceived by employees and affects them, a systematic literature review, following the PRISMA guidelines, was conducted across 6 scientific databases and 3251 records to identify the corresponding scientific literature. Hereby, 18 publications spanning different domains, methods, and thematical foci emerged that were subsequently analyzed to provide a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon. Overall, it was shown that from the employee-perspective, anthropomorphic agents are neither clearly positive, nor negative, whereby the concrete implementation heavily influences the effects.