Can you help me scale? A Systematic Analysis of Scaling Capabilities of Conversational Agents for Digital Services

Today’s servitized and digitalized society has significant implications for the economic system as value creation increasingly shifts towards digital services. Organizations are increasingly relying of artificial intelligence, which enables them to operate with novel technological artifacts like conversational agents (CA). These human-like AI-driven artifacts open new possibilities and channels for service providers to scale up their business even further and to create a business value or even to make processes more efficient. While we witness the results of that each day, we do not fully understand how such CAs can contribute to scaling up a business. Therefore, we conduct an analysis of service research and popular CAs to determine the status quo and highlight opportunities for scaling services with CAs. We contribute to theory by clarifying the meaning of scalability in combination with CAs and support practitioners by providing an overview about how organizations successfully scale their CAs.