Training Novices: The Role of Human-AI Collaboration and Knowledge Transfer

In various work environments expert knowledge is pivotal for humans to conduct tasks with high performance and ensure business success. These humans possess task-specific expert knowledge (TSEK) and hence, represent subject matter experts (SMEs). However, not only demographic changes but also personnel downsizing strategies lead and will continue to lead to departures of SMEs within organizations, which induces challenges on how to retain that expert knowledge and train novices to keep the competitive advantage elicited by that expert knowledge. The training of novices by SMEs is time and cost intensive and intensifying the need for alternatives. Human-AI collaboration (HAIC) poses a way out of this dilemma, facilitating alternatives to preserve expert knowledge and teach it to novices for tasks conducted by SMEs beforehand. In this workshop paper, we (1) propose a framework on how HAIC can train novices particular tasks, (2) illustrate the role of explicit and tacit knowledge in this training process via HAIC, and (3) illustrate a preliminary experiment design to assess the ability of AI systems in HAIC to act as a teacher to transfer TSEK to novices who do not possess prior TSEK.