Adaptation Through Communication: Assessing Human–Artificial Intelligence Partnership for the Design of Complex Engineering Systems

Exploring the opportunities for incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support team problem-solving has been the focus of intensive ongoing research. However, while the incorporation of such AI tools into human team problem-solving can improve team performance, it is still unclear what modality of AI integration will lead to a genuine human–AI partnership capable of mimicking the dynamic adaptability of humans. This work unites human designers with AI Partners as fellow team members who can both reactively and proactively collaborate in real-time toward solving a complex and evolving engineering problem. Team performance and problem-solving behaviors are examined using the HyForm collaborative research platform, which uses an online collaborative design environment that simulates a complex interdisciplinary design problem. The problem constraints are unexpectedly changed midway through problem-solving to simulate the nature of dynamically evolving engineering problems. This work shows that after the unexpected design constraints change, or shock, is introduced, human–AI hybrid teams perform similarly to human teams, demonstrating the capability of AI Partners to adapt to unexpected events. Nonetheless, hybrid teams do struggle more with coordination and communication after the shock is introduced. Overall, this work demonstrates that these AI design partners can participate as active partners within human teams during a large, complex task, showing promise for future integration in practice.