Integrating Intelligent Agents into Human Teams

As the role of teams becomes more important in organizations, developing and maintaining high performance teams has been the goal of several researchers (Decker, Sycara, & Williamson 1997; Beyerlein, Johnson, & Beyerlein, 2001, Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 1998; McNeese, Salas & Endsley, 2001; Salas, Bowers, & Edens, 2001) . One major question is how to turn a team of experts into an expert team. Several strategies such as task-related cross training (Salas, Cannon-Bowers, & Johnson, 1997; CannonBowers and Salas, 1998) have emerged. In addition to traditional behaviorally-based methods for facilitating team development, advances in computer science and robotics are now allowing the introduction of artificial intelligence (sic; intelligent agents) into teamwork in a variety of roles and functions. This advent of agent technologies raises two questions: 1) what kinds of assistance can be provided and 2) what kinds of assistance prove beneficial. The reported research attempts to answer these questions through technology demonstrations to document what is possible and behavioral experiments to identify what may be helpful.