Human-AI Interaction Researcher

• Compensation: EUR 46,021 - EUR 54,753 - yearly

Company Description

Meet Unit4 . With over 40 years of heritage, we’re an agile, fast growing, Cloud company that is on a mission to redefine Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for mid-market people-centric organisations.

With our innovative, self-driving, adaptive and intuitive software, our customers can spend more time on meaningful high-value work.

At the heart of what we do lies a simple yet profound purpose: Improve how people work by focusing on what truly matters. — A powerful statement that enables different priorities for different people.

We’re shaping how work should feel , and we empower our people by providing them with the right tools to achieve the autonomy they need - it's what makes us unique.

Job Description

A research position in Unit4 CTO, joining the team in Labs. You will work on how people and AI agents work together, so the systems agents operate stay understandable, trustworthy, and useful to the people they serve.

About the role

Enterprise software has always been an information system. For most of its history it was an information system built for people to operate directly. People read the screens, entered the data, and moved work through the steps the system laid out. The data meant something and the process meant something, but that meaning lived in the heads of the people using the system and in the code underneath it, never in a form the system itself could reason about.

That is changing now that meaning can be made explicit, so the system represents it, something else can read and act on it, and that something is increasingly an agent. The information system is becoming one that agents operate, in service of the people it has always been for. As the burden of reading the system, traversing it, and acting through it moves onto the software, the person's part changes. They author intent and judge outcomes rather than traverse machinery. How that relationship should work, how an agent should communicate, how it earns and keeps trust, and what it does to the way people think, decide, and work, are open questions. This role works on exactly that.

What already exists

Our AI First program has built a layered architecture in which meaning sits between the raw data and the agents that reason over it, a semantic data model and a semantic business process model, with metadata pipelines, data contracts, a catalog, and an ontology graph delivered as a proven proof of concept and now moving toward delivery. Agents already answer business questions over this layer. What we do not yet have is a research line on the human side of that interaction. Human-AI interaction is a new research area in Unit4 Research, and you would help define it from the start, drawing on what the program has built and on the experience of the teams taking agents into product. This is research on the relationship between people and AI, rather than product usability or customer research, though it should inform both.

What you will work on

This is a research role, so the questions are open, but the starting problems are concrete.

• Define and run the research agenda for human-AI interaction at Unit4, setting its priorities together with the program.
• Study how AI should interact and communicate with users, including how an agent presents itself, explains what it did, and signals what it is unsure of.
• Understand how trust between people and agents is built, calibrated, and lost, so people rely on an agent when they should and question it when they should not.
• Examine the cognitive and behavioral impact of AI on productivity and decision-making in everyday enterprise work.
• Help make human-AI collaboration safe, fair, transparent, and trustworthy, working with our responsible AI stakeholders.
• Turn findings into principles and patterns that guide future AI experiences across Unit4.