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A.J. Buszydlik
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Good Enough to Talk To?
Exploring the Acceptance and Social Presence of AI Chatbots for Human-Centered Task Training in Electrical Engineering Education
Generative AI chatbots are increasingly proposed as simulated stakeholders. These stakeholders let engineering students rehearse human-centered communication without the scheduling and access constraints of real interlocutors. In an engineering education context, how students receive such tools, and whether they engage with them as social partners, remains little studied. This paper examines the acceptance and perceived social presence of an AI-simulated non-technical stakeholder in an electrical engineering setting. Fifteen students each completed a single customer discovery interview with a large language model chatbot, framed around the Value Proposition Canvas. The study follows a convergent mixed-methods design, pairing UTAUT-derived acceptance constructs and an adapted social presence scale with a reflexive thematic analysis of the interaction transcripts and written reflections. Acceptance was high but conditional, and tracked how useful students judged the tool rather than how easy it was to use. Social presence was the lowest and most variable of the measured constructs and moved largely independently of perceived usefulness, so a more socially present chatbot did not register as a more useful one. Students valued the tool as an accessible option when real stakeholders were hard to reach, while noting absent empathy, predictable responses, and a risk of over-reliance. Transcripts show some students got the responses they wanted by engineering their prompts rather than by communicating as they would with a real stakeholder. These self-reported patterns indicate that such chatbots are best positioned as carefully bounded preparation before real stakeholder contact rather than as replacements for it.
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Generative AI chatbots are increasingly proposed as simulated stakeholders. These stakeholders let engineering students rehearse human-centered communication without the scheduling and access constraints of real interlocutors. In an engineering education context, how students receive such tools, and whether they engage with them as social partners, remains little studied. This paper examines the acceptance and perceived social presence of an AI-simulated non-technical stakeholder in an electrical engineering setting. Fifteen students each completed a single customer discovery interview with a large language model chatbot, framed around the Value Proposition Canvas. The study follows a convergent mixed-methods design, pairing UTAUT-derived acceptance constructs and an adapted social presence scale with a reflexive thematic analysis of the interaction transcripts and written reflections. Acceptance was high but conditional, and tracked how useful students judged the tool rather than how easy it was to use. Social presence was the lowest and most variable of the measured constructs and moved largely independently of perceived usefulness, so a more socially present chatbot did not register as a more useful one. Students valued the tool as an accessible option when real stakeholders were hard to reach, while noting absent empathy, predictable responses, and a risk of over-reliance. Transcripts show some students got the responses they wanted by engineering their prompts rather than by communicating as they would with a real stakeholder. These self-reported patterns indicate that such chatbots are best positioned as carefully bounded preparation before real stakeholder contact rather than as replacements for it.
The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots allows engineering, and design programs specifically, to simulate interactions with humans at low cost, but little research has been done on students' acceptance of and perceived empathic connection to AI chatbots. This paper conducts a user study to evaluate aforementioned aspects when practicing design interviews with students from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty at Delft University of Technology. Nine participants completed an exercise involving interviewing an AI persona and answered a questionnaire that adapted subscales from UTAUT2, COLLES, and EMPA-D. The students rated the chatbot consistently positive on ease of use and judged it moderately useful and professionally relevant, though opinions on its usefulness and their intention to keep using it varied widely. Self-reported empathy toward the persona was high on perspective-taking and self-awareness but lower and more variable on shared personal experience. These exploratory findings suggest that similar chatbots can provide accessible, low-stakes practice that engages students' empathic perspective-taking, while adoption and affective connection with a dissimilar persona remain open challenges. For educators in design programs, AI chatbots appear viable for low-stakes interview training, yet careful persona design and strategies for sustained engagement are needed before broader adoption.
...
The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots allows engineering, and design programs specifically, to simulate interactions with humans at low cost, but little research has been done on students' acceptance of and perceived empathic connection to AI chatbots. This paper conducts a user study to evaluate aforementioned aspects when practicing design interviews with students from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty at Delft University of Technology. Nine participants completed an exercise involving interviewing an AI persona and answered a questionnaire that adapted subscales from UTAUT2, COLLES, and EMPA-D. The students rated the chatbot consistently positive on ease of use and judged it moderately useful and professionally relevant, though opinions on its usefulness and their intention to keep using it varied widely. Self-reported empathy toward the persona was high on perspective-taking and self-awareness but lower and more variable on shared personal experience. These exploratory findings suggest that similar chatbots can provide accessible, low-stakes practice that engages students' empathic perspective-taking, while adoption and affective connection with a dissimilar persona remain open challenges. For educators in design programs, AI chatbots appear viable for low-stakes interview training, yet careful persona design and strategies for sustained engagement are needed before broader adoption.