Abstract: Help-seeking and help-giving have long been central to novel and wondrous innovation journeys. Increasingly, these journeys involve turning to machines for assistance. How, then, will help-seeking and giving be transformed? In Wonderland, Alice’s adventures involved asking for help with directions, access, and how to “resize” her capabilities and identities. She often received cryptic, obstructive, or only partially useful responses that forced her to self-navigate. Our first contribution is a temporal model of help episodes that explains how vulnerability is activated, negotiated, and transformed over time. Second, we theorize AI agents as new “Wonderland creatures” that reconfigure these dynamics by lowering the costs of initiating help, modularizing knowledge into representational artifacts, and offering instant, seemingly authoritative guidance, while simultaneously transforming collaborative human help into machine consultation without relational connection. In this shift, explicit requests and expressed curiosity risk being displaced by noncommittal, on-demand assistance; duration and delay disappear, potentially eroding human inquiry, shared puzzling, and wonder.Third, we connect these micro-level trajectories of AI-mediated help to meso-level organizational learning and collective commitment. We explain when AI agents augment interactional expertise and when they displace the very practices of asking, responding, and co-interpreting through which organizations remain “alive” in uncertain, creative project work. This framework opens avenues for future research on temporality, vulnerability, and human–AI configurations in creative project work.

 

 

About Sirkka Jarvenpaa

Dr. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa is Professor of Information Systems and  Bayless/Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Chair in Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on inter-organizational  and inter-personal collaboration and innovation in fast paced and technologically advanced data and knowledge environments with regulatory and policy implications.   Her work has appeared in information systems, management, engineering, accounting, marketing, psychology, and anthropology journals. She has published a co-authored book “Words Matter: Communicating Effectively in the New Global Office.” She is a recipient of Association of Information Systems (AIS) Fellow and LEO Awards (LEO stands for Life Time Achievement of Exceptional Global Contributions in the field of information systems). She has received the  Information Systems Society (ISS) Distinguished Fellow Award.  She is a recipient of the Alexander Humboldt Prize for her research achievements. She has been awarded five honorary doctorates.