Robot colleagues – a trend that requires research
2024-10-03In the project “AI-robotar i besöksnäringen: En framtid med nya kollegor” (AI robots in the tourism industry: a future with new colleagues), researchers from Karlstad Business School and the Service Research Center (CTF) are looking at how employees in the tourism industry are affected by having AI robots as colleagues.
Kristina Palm, Poja Shams, Nina Löfgren and Maria Åkesson from CTF, along with Calle Rosengren from Kristianstad University and Carin Håkansta from Karolinska Institutet, are running the 2-year project, starting in June 2025. Strawberry Hotel, Furhat Robotics and Compare Karlstad are also taking part in the project.
Kristina Palm, professor of working life science at Karlstad Business School, why is this project important?
– Together with Poja, Calle and Carin, I’m running two projects that examine the impact on work when employees are introduced to robots as colleagues. One of the organisations we are studying is a company in the tourism industry where we have found interesting aspects about emotional work that we think need to be studied further. The tourism industry is an industry with staff shortage and there is a trend to let robots do part of the work of employees. For that reason, it is important to study the impacts on work and the working environment of the employees who remain.
The project has been granted SEK 3.8 million from BFUF (the R&D Fund of the Swedish Tourism & Hospitality Industry).