Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.

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Post-acceptance IS use is the key to leveraging value from IS investments. However, it also poses many demands on the user. Drawing on the challenge-hindrance stressor framework, this study develops a theory to explain how and why IS use stressors influence post-acceptance use. We identify two different types of IS use stressors: challenge IS use stressors and hindrance IS use stressors. We hypothesize that they are appraised through challenge IS use appraisal and hindrance IS use appraisal, respectively, through which they influence routine use and innovative use. We evaluate our hypotheses by surveying 178 users working in one organization and analyze the data collected using consistent partial least square (PLSc). We find that challenge IS use stressors positively influence routine use and innovative use via challenge IS use appraisal. Hindrance IS use stressors negatively influence routine use via hindrance IS use appraisal. We then dive deeper into these findings using a two-step fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), identifying the presence of challenge IS use stressors and challenge IS use appraisal as necessary conditions for high innovative use. We also reveal that the presence of hindrance IS use stressors and hindrance IS use appraisal only influences routine use and innovative use in the absence of challenge IS use stressors and challenge IS use appraisal. We discuss the practical relevance and transferability of our findings based on a comprehensive applicability check. Our findings advance IS scholarship of IS use stress and post-acceptance use by showing how routine use and innovative use emanate from IS use stressors.

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