Re-defining the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in wiser service systems

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are raising important questions for companies, employees, consumers and policy makers. Researchers predict that intelligent machine will outperform humans in a wide range of tasks in the coming decade. Our purpose is to re-define the role of AI technologies and their relationship with people by re-thinking the concept of Intelligence Augmentation (IA), an interaction between AI technologies and people that, more than amplifying human capacities, produce a cognitive transformation. This transformation modifies the structure of humans thought, changing people’s cognitive processes and providing new tools to optimize interpretative schemas, useful to analyze the real world. In line with the need to define new directions in Service Science, new rules should be formulated to create a synergic and collaborative processes between humans (people) and machines. In order to design a wiser service system, this paper proposes T-shaped professionals as especially well-adapted for augmented and collaborative intelligence.