A Review of Human-AI Complementarities Across Multiple Dimensions of Organisational Complexity
TL;DR
A five-dimensional diagnostic framework that maps the challenges of human-AI collaboration across Integration, Representation, Scale, Temporality, and Adequacy gaps and shows that augmentation remains the dominant and most viable mode of use in complex environments.
Abstract
The growing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have not translated straightforwardly into organisational value. A persistent disconnect—the “last-mile problem”—arises from structural gaps between idealised AI tasks and real-world organisational contexts. Synthesising insights from organisational theory, cognitive science, and computer science, we have developed a five-dimensional diagnostic framework that maps the challenges of human-AI collaboration across Integration, Representation, Scale, Temporality, and Adequacy gaps. These gaps illuminate how socio-technical complexity, contextualised problem representations, interdependencies among agents, dynamic environments, and limitations in current AI reasoning collectively constrain full automation and demand human judgement. By reviewing the historical evolution of AI—from symbolic systems to machine learning, generative models, and emerging agentic approaches—we show that augmentation remains the dominant and most viable mode of use in complex environments. An illustrative system-dynamics example demonstrates how improvements in algorithmic performance do not automatically yield proportional system-level gains. Overall, our framework provides researchers with a conceptual lens and practitioners with a diagnostic tool for assessing complementarities and informing the design of human-AI collaborations. The framework is offered as a conceptual synthesis and diagnostic instrument rather than an empirically validated model.