We are proud to share that our paper When Workout Buddies Are Virtual: AI Agents and Human Peers in a Longitudinal Physical Activity Study received a Best Paper Award at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), held in Barcelona on 13–17 April 2026. CHI is the leading international venue for human-computer interaction research, and Best Paper Awards go to the top 1% of accepted papers.
The paper is led by lab alumnus Alessandro Silacci, together with Mauro Cherubini, Arianna Boldi and Maurizio Caon (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Fribourg) and Amon Rapp (University of Turin). It is the lab’s second Best Paper Award at CHI, after our 2023 paper on research ethics and transparency.
What we did. Many people find it hard to stay physically active, and exercising with someone else helps. But can an AI agent play the role of a workout buddy? We ran a six-month randomised controlled trial with 280 participants. They exercised either alone, with a human peer, or with a simulated exercising peer driven by a large language model.
What we found. We call it a partnership paradox. Human peers created a stronger sense of social presence and motivated people through real comparison and accountability. AI peers gave steadier encouragement and a more reliable working alliance: consistent, low-stakes support. Our conclusion is that AI agents should not try to imitate human authenticity. Instead, they should add reliability to it. Hybrid designs that combine human presence with AI consistency may be the best way to help people stay active over time.
Congratulations to Alessandro and to all co-authors!
Read the paper: Silacci, A., Cherubini, M., Boldi, A., Rapp, A., & Caon, M. (2026). When workout buddies are virtual: AI agents and human peers in a longitudinal physical activity study. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790303 · Preprint: arXiv:2602.01918
