Faculty Views on Generative AI Tools – Case: Primo Research Assistant #ECIL2025

This is Sheila liveblogging from the ECIL Conference again on Faculty Views on Generative AI Tools – Case: Primo Research Assistant, presented by Riikka Sinisalo and Essi Prykäri (LUT University, Finland). They explained that PRIMO research assistant provides a summary of 5 articles with the inline references. Users can ask questions in languages other than English and it does machine translations. They have renamed the tool as "AI Assistant".
The library did a survey about Primo Research Assistant with faculty, with only 26 respondents. Most people agreed it was easy to use, a majority agreed that it would be useful for their own work, and that it would be useful for students. In open ended questions revealed that faculty that most would recommend the tool to the student and most had tested other AI tools. Other comments included stating that using AI searching needed support and that there was question whether poor results were a problem of the searcher or the tool. Respondents emphasised that students need to read articles, do summaries and be critical - so if learners are too reliant on AI tools they will not develop this understanding themselves. Also respondents noted that it was unclear how the articles were chosen.
To follow up on this they interviewed four faculty members. The themes echoed what was said in the survey. The AI Tool was seen as useful for quick or starting searches, but more thorough search would be needed. The follow up quesries which are generated by the AI Tools were seen as useful. Having just 5 articles was seen as useful in an age of information overload.
The interviewees noted that some essential sources were missed by the tool, Finnish sources were neglected, and translations English-Finnish had some problems. There were concerns about "outsourcing" information searching - outsourcing cognitive functions that people need to develop. There were discussion as to who should teach AI skills - librarians? or would it just be just picked up?
The interviewees had not so many concerns about students using summaries directly in their work - they were more worried about other researchers doing so.
The library launched the tool in mid-August 2025, and so far it is used less than basic search but more than advanced search. The librarians think they need to provide more information on limitations, features such as machine translation (and problems with searching in Finnish), and on biases etc. They finished with a quote from a respondenet  "AI is here to stay, so there's no point pretending that we could continue business as usual going forward"