AI Evaluation Should Prioritize Human-AI Team Performance

Jan Kulveit, Gavin Leech, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Raymond Douglas· August 17, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • Current AI evaluation focuses too much on superhuman autonomous performance.
  • This focus implicitly targets human replacement, which is a misdirection.
  • AI evaluation should shift to human-AI team performance.
  • Collaborative AI fosters systems that complement human capabilities, leading to better societal outcomes.

Who benefits

All industriesTechHealthcareEducationManufacturing

Summary

This position paper argues that the current AI evaluation paradigm, which focuses on superhuman autonomous performance, misdirects AI development. It advocates for a shift towards evaluating human-AI team performance to foster systems that complement human capabilities and lead to better societal outcomes.

The prevailing approach to evaluating Artificial Intelligence systems largely centers on achieving superhuman performance in autonomous tasks, implicitly aiming for AI to replace human roles. This paper posits that such a paradigm is fundamentally flawed and steers AI development in an unproductive direction. Instead, the authors advocate for a significant reorientation of AI evaluation. They propose that the AI community should prioritize assessing the performance of human-AI teams. This collaborative shift is argued to be essential for cultivating AI systems that genuinely complement human abilities, rather than merely superseding them. By focusing on augmentation and partnership, this new evaluation framework is expected to yield far superior societal benefits and outcomes compared to the current, replacement-oriented model.

Why it matters

Professionals across all industries need to consider how AI integrates with human workflows, and this paper challenges the prevailing "AI replaces human" narrative, promoting a more effective and ethical "AI augments human" approach.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Re-evaluate internal AI project goals to prioritize human-AI collaboration over full automation.
  2. 2Design new AI system evaluations that measure the combined performance of human-AI teams.
  3. 3Invest in user experience research to understand how AI can best complement human tasks.
  4. 4Develop training programs that focus on human-AI teaming skills for employees.
  5. 5Advocate for a shift in industry standards and benchmarks towards collaborative AI metrics.

Original post by Jan Kulveit, Gavin Leech, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Raymond Douglas

"arXiv:2608.13577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This position paper argues that the dominant paradigm of AI evaluation (which focuses on superhuman autonomous performance and so implicitly targets the goal of replacing humans) is guiding AI development in the wrong direction. Ins…"

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Originally posted by Jan Kulveit, Gavin Leech, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Raymond Douglas on X · view source

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