Embodied AI Agents for Team Collaboration in Co-located Blue-Collar Work

TL;DR

This paper discusses how embodied AI agents can enhance team collaboration and communication in co-located blue-collar work environments, emphasizing their role in shared situational awareness and inclusive interaction.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of embodied AI in blue-collar settings, presents speculative scenarios, and outlines open research questions for designing inclusive embodied AI agents.

Findings

Embodied AI can support situational awareness in blue-collar teams.

Embodiment influences communication and inclusion in collaborative work.

Open questions for future design of embodied AI in industrial contexts.

Abstract

Blue-collar work is often highly collaborative, embodied, and situated in shared physical environments, yet most research on collaborative AI has focused on white-collar work. This position paper explores how the embodied nature of AI agents can support team collaboration and communication in co-located blue-collar workplaces. From the context of our newly started CAI-BLUE research project, we present two speculative scenarios from industrial and maintenance contexts that illustrate how embodied AI agents can support shared situational awareness and facilitate inclusive communication across experience levels. We outline open questions related to embodied AI agent design around worker inclusion, agency, transformation of blue-collar collaboration practices over time, and forms of acceptable AI embodiments. We argue that embodiment is not just an aesthetic choice but should become a socio-material design strategy of AI systems in blue-collar workplaces.