TY - CONF A1 - Steigerwald, Philipp A1 - Bienlein, Nico A1 - Burghardt, Jennifer A1 - Stieler, Mara A1 - Lehmann, Robert A1 - Albrecht, Jens T1 - CAIA in Practice: Field Evaluation of an AI-Assisted Support System for Text-Based Online Counselling T2 - 2025 IEEE 37th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) N2 - Rising global demand for mental health support creates significant service delivery challenges, with asynchronous email counselling serving as a crucial low-threshold channel for accessing care. This paper presents CAIA, a co-designed AIbased tool suite that demonstrates responsible AI integration into counselling practice through seven LLM-driven functions enhanced by retrieval-augmented generation. A field evaluation involved 34 professional counsellors conducting authentic sessions with trained student counsellees (36 threads, 321 messages, 1,257 AI outputs). User behaviour analysis confirms substantial adoption, revealing that professional autonomy and information accuracy are decisive for sustained acceptance, with counsellors particularly valuing interpretive functionalities that provide new perspectives and stimulate professional reflection. KW - AI-Assisted Counselling KW - Email Counselling KW - Large Language Models KW - Retrieval-Augmented Generation KW - User KW - Adoption Study KW - Human-AI Collaboration Y1 - 2025 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-ohm/frontdoor/index/index/docId/4529 SP - 1476 EP - 1483 PB - IEEE ER -