As businesses increasingly adopt AI-driven decision making, experts agree that the most interesting questions are not about whether humans can beat machines or vice versa, but how the two forms of intelligence can most fruitfully collaborate—and how organizations can best facilitate those collaborations.

In a recent essay published in the Journal of Organization Design, I pointed out that there are at least four distinct forms of division of labor between humans and AI when it comes to decision-making tasks. Humans and AI can either specialize to perform different tasks or not, either in sequence or in parallel. Specialization seems the way to go when there is a clear advantage for one type of intelligence at some portions of a task. For example, activities such as leading a meeting or conducting sales calls are best left in human hands, while a number-based assessment of the relative financial performance of companies in a portfolio clearly plays to algorithmic strengths.

 …