A School of Continuous Improvement research poster interviews staff across three offices about an AI scheduling assistant that auto-declines meetings landing inside a colleague's Focus Time, and finds one partner office already weighting flexible-rostering eligibility by the assistant's own Protected-Time Score.
An interview study across three offices finds declined meetings resent within minutes, and rostering eligibility increasingly hangs on the assistant's own compliance score
An assistant that declines a meeting on someone’s behalf does not, on the strength of new interviews from the School of Continuous Improvement, appear to end the meeting. Staff across three professional-services offices describe what happens after their scheduling assistant auto-declines an invitation for landing inside a protected Focus Time block, and the decline is rarely the last word: most invitations return within minutes, by a different channel, and interviewees call the resend routine rather than a workaround.
Led by Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, with Dr Bram Ntuli and Dr Marit Osayande, the study paired 34 semi-structured interviews with a log audit of 118 assistant-declined invites and the platform’s own Protected-Time Score. Resend latency ran to a median of six minutes, and the pattern held regardless of seniority or how long the assistant had been in place.
What we’ve learned is less about the assistant than about how quickly an office decides a number is worth keeping.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
One participating office has already begun weighting flexible-rostering eligibility by an individual’s quarterly score. “The next review cycle will tell us whether naming a reason in the decline message changes anything,” said Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard, “or just changes what people say to the assistant instead of to each other.”
The School of Continuous Improvement counts this among the studies it values most: not for what the assistant does, but for what an organisation does once the assistant hands it a number. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l1jgcg.