Leaders Must Create 4 Scenarios for Human-AI Collaboration at Work (www.gartner.com)

Gartner researchers, speaking at their IT Symposium/Xpo, urge executives to plan for four distinct human–AI workplace scenarios: (1) partial automation where fewer workers handle tasks AI can’t complete, (2) AI-first or autonomous businesses with dramatically reduced human roles, (3) widespread augmentation where many busy workers use AI to do the same jobs better, and (4) transformative collaboration where skilled humans plus AI push into new knowledge frontiers (e.g., personalized medicine). Gartner’s Poitevin warns leaders must be ready to support all four paths, investing in both automation and augmentation and adopting an “abundance mindset” that sees AI as a way to tackle new and existing challenges. The guidance matters because these scenarios imply different technical priorities and organizational designs: varying degrees of automation and human-in-the-loop workflows, changes in workforce size and skill mixes, stronger needs for cross-disciplinary data sharing, and governance for safety and ethics. Practically, companies must balance infrastructure for autonomous systems, tooling for everyday augmentation, reskilling pipelines, and policies that enable collaborative, high-impact research uses of AI. Gartner points clients to its AI Use Case Insights tool and further reporting to help evaluate use cases and prepare for the ripple effects as multiple scenarios begin to coexist across industries.