A model of work in which outcomes are produced through sustained interaction between humans and intelligent machines, with responsibility and influence distributed across human judgment, decision-making, and machine-driven pattern recognition and execution.

Prior to roughly 2023, most discussions of AI in the workplace framed human–machine interaction in terms of automation, augmentation, or AI assistance, positioning machines primarily as tools that replaced or supported specific human tasks.

With the increasing adoption of generative AI systems, this framing has shifted toward co-production, reflecting the growing reality that work outcomes increasingly emerge from joint human–machine activity (shared agency). This is characterized by humans shaping goals, context, and constraints while machines extend, recombine, and scale linguistic and computational patterns across workflows.