CAIA in Practice: Field Evaluation of an AI-Assisted Support System for Text-Based Online Counselling

  • 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.

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Author:Philipp Steigerwald, Nico Bienlein, Jennifer Burghardt, Mara Stieler, Robert Lehmann, Jens AlbrechtORCiD
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ICTAI66417.2025.00214
Parent Title (English):2025 IEEE 37th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI)
Publisher:IEEE
Document Type:conference proceeding (article)
Language:English
Reviewed:Begutachtet/Reviewed
Release Date:2026/01/13
Tag:AI-Assisted Counselling; Adoption Study; Email Counselling; Human-AI Collaboration; Large Language Models; Retrieval-Augmented Generation; User
Pagenumber:8
First Page:1476
Last Page:1483
institutes:Institut für e-Beratung
Fakultät Informatik
Fakultät Sozialwissenschaften
Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (KIZ)
Research Themes:Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz
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