Navigating Complex Search Tasks with AI Copilots: The Undiscovered Country and References

Table of Links

Abstract and Taking Search to task

AI Copilots

Challenges

Opportunities

The Undiscovered Country and References

5 THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

AI copilots will transform how we search. Tasks are central to people’s lives and more support is needed for complex tasks in search settings. Some limited support for these tasks already exists in search engines, but copilots will expand the task frontier to make more tasks actionable and address the “last mile” in search interaction: task completion [58]. Moving forward, search providers should invest in “better together” experiences that utilize copilots plus traditional search, make these joint experiences more seamless for searchers, and add more support for their use in practice, e.g., help people to quickly understand copilot capabilities and potential and/or recommend the best modality for the current task or task stage. This includes experiences where both modalities are offered separately and can be selected by searchers and those where there

is unification and the selection happens automatically based on the query and the conversation context. The foundation models that power copilots have other search-related applications, e.g., for generating and applying intent taxonomies [43] or for evaluation [19]. We must retain a continued focus on human-AI cooperation, where searchers stay in control while the degree of system support increases as needed [44], and on AI safety. Searchers need to be able to trust copilots in general but also be able to verify their answers with minimal effort. Overall, the future is bright for IR, and AI research in general, with the advent of generative AI and the copilots that build upon it. Copilots will help augment and empower searchers in their information seeking journeys. Computer science researchers and practitioners should embrace this new era of assistive agents and engage across the full spectrum of exciting practical and scientific opportunities, both within information seeking as we focused on here, and onwards into other important domains such as personal productivity [5] and scientific discovery [22].

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