Potential Contributions of Artificial Intelligence in Crowd Engineering

Opening up product development in companies to external interdisciplinary participants offers the opportunity to develop products faster and more cost-effectively. An early integration of potential customers in the product development process enables a stronger focus on their needs and thus facilitates customised product development. A lack of suitable tools and rigid processes within companies, however, make this integration unpractical in many cases. In this context, Crowd Engineering allows the involvement of an engineering community, with community members being integrated in such a way that they can participate actively and in a distributed manner in product development using a central internet platform. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence methods and approaches are becoming more sophisticated and acquire more importance in various aspects of private life and business context by providing new solutions to topics which formerly were not solvable or only with high efforts. This paper analyses how artificial intelligence can support product development, especially in the context of Crowd Engineering. It thereby provides an overview of how artificial intelligence already supports development processes today and which potentials arise from this. Furthermore, an analysis of the collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence is carried out in the context of Crowd Engineering. The main research questions are how artificial intelligence can support in collaboration and how the role of humans is being shaped and transformed. Another key question is how collaboration can be achieved in the context of Crowd Engineering—hence this paper proposes collaboration modes that vary according to three dimensions of collaboration: degree of AI-assistance, degree of task complexity and the degree of AI-autonomy.