Revealing the Challenges to Automation Adoption in Organizations: Examining Practitioner Perspectives From an International Airport

Sustained adoption of automation is a problem for organizations, despite the promised benefits of automation and the propensity for organizations to expect it to transform their workplaces. To address this problem, previous work in HCI has mostly considered the perspectives and experiences of users interacting with automation technologies and has not considered the broader organizational context consisting of different stakeholders with varying needs and expectations around automation. Taking Amsterdam Airport Schiphol as a case study, we examine the challenges faced by practitioners responsible for integrating automation projects in its airside ecosystem, in an interview study conducted with 8 participants. Our findings reveal three challenges to the adoption of automation within the organization - the lack of consensus among different stakeholders, the need to adapt the technology to the specific context, and the undefined procedures required to maintain automation after implementation, that should be further addressed by the HCI community.