Dennis Benner successfully defended his dissertation entitled "From Simple Interaction to Meaningful Engagement: A Deep Dive Into the Persuasive Design of Conversational Agents" on July 4, 2025.
In his work, he deals with the use of Persuasive Conversational Agents (PCAs) and generative elaborated feedback in an educational context. The aim of the research was to investigate the potential of these technologies to support learning behavior and user perception. The basis for this was a field experiment and an online experiment, with which both a technical proof of concept was developed and initial empirical findings on the effectiveness of such AI-based systems were obtained.

After the successful disputation, Dennis Benner was honored with a doctoral hat. This hat, designed by colleagues and commented on and presented by Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister, represents shared experiences and special features during the newly completed doctorate.