Keynotes
The scientific program on Wednesday to Friday will be enriched with two keynotes by experienced CSCW researchers.
### Wednesday, July 1st 09:30-10:30 Opening Keynote
**Yvonne Rogers, University College London** ,**UK**
#### **Should CSCW jump on the Agentic AI Bandwagon?**
Agentic AI is coming of age. Essentially, it is a system of agents that can act proactively, plan and execute the steps needed to reach complex goals, using various tools and data sources, automatically or in collaboration with humans. A well-known example is agentic travel planning, where agents go about their business, booking flights, hotels, and experiences, based on someone’s preferences and availability. There is much hype about how it will transform work, through optimising all manner of complex workflows, and, in so doing, empowering organisations, companies and society at large. A key question this raises is this desirable? Moreover, how much automation vs how much human collaboration and orchestration should there be? CSCW, with its background, knowledge, and expertise in collaborative work is ideally suited to address these new challenges. In many ways, I see a parallel transition in our midst from how GenAI was designed to support individual users to how Agentic AI can be developed for collaborative working. CSCW emerged from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the mid-1980s because it was more concerned with how the emergent technologies could support collaborative working and social interactions, rather than the user. Just as HCI has become more concerned with human-centred AI, will CSCW become more concerned with society-centred AI? In my talk, I will consider the new challenges that are afoot and whether CSCW has the appetite for addressing them.
**Yvonne Rogers**
Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of human-computer interaction and human-centered AI. A central theme of her work is how to design interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through designing, implementing and deploying a diversity of technologies. Yvonne has published over 350 papers and books on a variety of topics, including human augmentation, behavioural change, collaborative working, decision-making, technology enhanced learning, privacy, novel interfaces and human-robot interactions. She is also one of the authors of the definitive textbook on Interaction Design and HCI (now in its 6th edition), that has sold over 300,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into many languages.
### Thursday, July 2nd 11:00-12:30 Keynote
**Petra Schubert, Sue Williams, University of Koblenz, Germany**
#### **From collaboration software portfolios to enterprise collaboration platforms**
Collaboration technologies to support organisational workgroups have evolved significantly over the past two decades, from portfolios of unconnected tools to enterprise-wide information infrastructures supporting collaborative work and the production of digital work products. However, despite these changes, the majority of research is still focused on situated, micro-level studies of individuals and workgroups and lacks a long term, large-scale, organisational level perspective. In this presentation we introduce a long-term university-industry research programme, which has, for the past 15 years, followed the organisational and institutional imperatives shaping the design and use of enterprise collaboration systems in over 40 medium- and large-sized organisations in the DACH region.
Our goals for the presentation are twofold. First, we introduce the theoretical positioning and challenges of establishing and sustaining a long-term practice-based research programme. Second, we discuss the emergence and shaping of large-scale collaboration platforms as a new category of enterprise-level software and, drawing on key research findings, show how these have evolved over time. Finally, we examine recent trends in the design of enterprise collaboration platforms focusing on the introduction of AI to deliver new content-based services, and the pressing imperative for digital sovereignty.
**Petra Schubert**
Petra Schubert is Professor of Business Application Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Koblenz. She is the Director of the Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies (UCT) and Co-Director of the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR). One of her main projects is the University-Industry Collaboration IndustryConnect. She has been active in teaching and research in the field of Enterprise Collaboration Systems for more than 30 years. Her recent work is focused on the investigation of collaboration software, in particular the building of enterprise-level collaboration platforms and the analysis of the digital traces of collaborative work.
**Susan P. Williams**
Susan P. Williams is a founding member of the Centre for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) and joint coordinator of IndustryConnect, a university-industry research community. From 2010-2025 she was a Professor of Enterprise Information Management at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Sue’s research examines complex sociotechnical change and the design, use and consequences of new technologies in organisational contexts. An interdisciplinary researcher, her work investigates emerging information
infrastructures and the ways that platforms for enterprise collaboration are transforming organisational work and the digital workplace.
Did you know that the speakers and topics of the ECSCW 2026 keynotes have been revealed? 😃 Yvonne Rogers will examine the potential role of agentic AI in the field of CSCW. Later on, Petra Schubert and Sue Williams will show us how enterprise collaboration systems work. Don’t miss them! 🗓️
