Consensus-building is an essential process for the success of co-design projects. We ask whether conversational agents such as chatbots could facilitate asynchronous consensus-building in large co-design projects with multiple stakeholders.

Our results indicate that interacting with a chatbot can increase stakeholders’ willingness to commit to group decisions by eliciting the perceived joint effort and fairness, also in the face of group decisions that conflict with one’s own opinions. We discuss design implications for facilitating consensus-building with chatbots and the potential benefits that chatbots may bring to asynchronous co-design.