Elaborating Team Roles for Artificial Intelligence-based Teammates in Human-AI Collaboration

The increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday work also means that new insights into team collaboration must be gained. It is important to research how changes in team composition affect joint work, as previous theories and insights on teams are based on the knowledge of pure human teams. Especially, when AI-based systems act as coequal partners in collaboration scenarios, their role within the team needs to be defined. With a multi-method approach including a quantitative and a qualitative study, we constructed four team roles for AI-based teammates. In our quantitative survey based on existing team role concepts (n = 1.358), we used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to construct possible roles that AI-based teammates can fulfill in teams. With nine expert interviews, we discussed and further extended our initially identified team roles, to construct consistent team roles for AI-based teammates. The results show four consistent team roles: the coordinator, creator, perfectionist and doer. The new team roles including their skills and behaviors can help to better design hybrid human-AI teams and to better understand team dynamics and processes.