Human-AI Collaboration: Coordinating Automation and Augmentation Tasks in a Digital Service Company

Organizations are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to support service development and delivery. Both AI and human action need to be organized and coordinated. Recently, the automation-augmentation paradox has been discussed in literature. Automation implies that machines take over a human task, whereas with augmentation humans and machines collaborate closely to perform different tasks. In this paper, we investigate how the collaboration between humans and AI unfolds in different organizational coordination mechanisms. Using Mintzberg’s coordination mechanism (1989), we analyzed the division of labor between human and AI in a case company offering personalized recipes of vegetarian dishes. Our findings suggest that certain primary coordination mechanisms (direct supervision and standardization of norms) need to be in place for the AI to perform properly. We find that AI can take control over service scaling and service personalization (augmentation), whereas humans are in control of service improvement (automation).