CLARA: AI-Mediated Facilitation for Enhancing Group Cognition and Cohesion in Remote Collaboration

Video conferencing is essential for remote collaboration, but it often leads to fatigue, reduced social presence, and ineffective communication. Traditional human facilitators can address these challenges, but cannot scale to meet the demands of countless daily virtual meetings across organisations. To address these challenges, we introduce CLARA (Cognitive Load and Affect Aware Agent), an AI-mediated facilitator that enhances group decision-making by dynamically managing cognitive load and affective engagement. CLARA employs real-time multimodal assessment of group states, providing adaptive cognitive prompts to optimise task focus and affective cues to foster positive dynamics. In a controlled study (N = 48), we compared Baseline, Cognitive Feedback (CF), Affective Feedback (AF), and Combined Feedback (CAF) conditions. Results show CAF significantly improved task performance, reduced mental demand, and enhanced social presence, outperforming all other conditions. Participants rated CAF as having the highest level of facilitator expertise and preference. These findings highlight the benefits of integrated AI-driven facilitation, offering design insights for human-centred, effective virtual collaboration tools that balance task efficiency with positive socio-emotional engagement.