Designing Human–AI Collaboration at Scale: From Abductive Design Theorizing to Trustworthy Conversational Agents in Finance

Organised by ABRI and KIN Center for Digital Innovation. View the seminar page for more information and registration.

Abstract

As AI systems increasingly participate in decision-making and customer interaction, organizations face a critical challenge: how can we design human–AI collaboration that is trustworthy, meaningful, and effective? Information systems research and particularly design science has made major contributions by creating innovative, context-specific digital systems. Yet our field still struggles to accumulate this knowledge into generalizable and reusable design theory. In this talk, I present abductive design theorizing, a structured approach for synthesizing diverse design knowledge into coherent, actionable theory. This approach addresses one of the most pressing methodological challenges in design science research: moving from isolated artifact contributions toward integrated and scalable design knowledge. To illustrate this, I will share insights from an ongoing research project at the Flow Factory, a joint innovation lab of the University of Münster (ERCIS) and the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. In collaboration with multiple financial institutions, we aim to develop a unified design theory for trustworthy conversational agents across text, voice, and embodied modalities. The goal is to prepare AI systems to scale in a real-world financial ecosystem serving more than 50 million customers.