  Effective task management is essential to successful team collaboration.
While the past decade has seen considerable innovation in systems that track
and manage group tasks, these innovations have typically been outside of the
principal communication channels: email, instant messenger, and group chat.
Teams formulate, discuss, refine, assign, and track the progress of their
collaborative tasks over electronic communication channels, yet they must leave
these channels to update their task-tracking tools, creating a source of
friction and inefficiency. To address this problem, we explore how bots might
be used to mediate task management for individuals and teams. We deploy a
prototype bot to eight different teams of information workers to help them
create, assign, and keep track of tasks, all within their main communication
channel. We derived seven insights for the design of future bots for
coordinating work.
