A Compact Screening Protocol for Human-AI Co-creation in Technical Knowledge Work
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23726/cij.2026.1833Keywords:
co-creation, human-AI collaboration, knowledge management, LLM assistantAbstract
Enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) assistants can accelerate access to internal engineering knowledge, but organisations need lightweight ways to decide where such systems should support, be verified, or be kept out of the workflow. We present a compact delegation-screening protocol for human-AI co-creation in document-based engineering work. The protocol combines time-to-answer, category-stratified correctness, and deliberately unanswerable items as an acceptance test for delegation boundaries. We demonstrate a first deployment using 19 internal technical PDF reports, 40 questions spanning eight task types, including four intentionally unanswerable items. Six engineers and a single-shot enterprise LLM assistant answered the same set of questions. The assistant reduced mean time-to-answer from 62.4 s to 9.7 s but achieved lower answerable-item correctness (66.7% vs 78.2%) and answered all unanswerable items confidently instead of abstaining, signalling a governance risk. The method turns these patterns into explicit role-allocation rules for trustworthy human-AI co-creation.
References
Amershi, S., Weld, D., Vorvoreanu, M., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Collisson, P., Suh, J., Iqbal, S., Bennett, P. N., Inkpen, K., Teevan, J., Kikin-Gil, R., & Horvitz, E. (2019). Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction. In S. Brewster, G. Fitzpatrick, A. Cox, & V. Kostakos (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–13. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300233
Becker, D., Deck, L., Feulner, S., Gutheil, N., Schüll, M., Decker, S., Eymann, T., Gimpel, H., Pippow, A., Röglinger, M., & Urbach, N. (2024). Lohnt sich Microsoft 365 Copilot? https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13859937
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 610–623. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D., & Raymond, L. (2025). Generative AI at Work. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 140(2): 889–942. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae044
Dellermann, D., Calma, A., Lipusch, N., Weber, T., Weigel, S., & Ebel, P. (2019). The Future of Human-AI Collaboration: A Taxonomy of Design Knowledge for Hybrid Intelligence Systems. In T. Bui (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2019.034
Fagadau, I. D., Mariani, L., Micucci, D., & Riganelli, O. (2024). Analyzing Prompt Influence on Automated Method Generation: An Empirical Study with Copilot. In O. Baysal, M. Linares-Vasquez, K. P. Moran, & I. Steinmacher (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, pp. 24–34. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643916.3644409
Geifman, Y., & El-Yaniv, R. (2017). Selective Classification for Deep Neural Networks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1705.08500
Gelner, A., Eitel, M., Mikhail, M., Olbrich, L., Pierri, A., Borgato, A., & Landgraf, T. (2023). Exploration on the effectiveness of face-to-face and virtual meetings in educational projects dealing with impact innovation. CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation, 7(1): 12-17. https://doi.org/10.23726/cij.2023.1415
Huang, L., Yu, W., Ma, W., Zhong, W., Feng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, Q., Peng, W., Feng, X., Qin, B., & Liu, T. (2025). A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 43(2): 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3703155
Knoth, N., Decker, M., Laupichler, M. C., Pinski, M., Buchholtz, N., Bata, K., & Schultz, B. (2024). Developing a holistic AI literacy assessment matrix – Bridging generic, domain-specific, and ethical competencies. Computers and Education Open, 6: 100177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2024.100177
Kristiansen, J. N., & Ritala, P. (2018). Measuring radical innovation project success: typical metrics don’t work. Journal of Business Strategy, 39(4): 34–41. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-09-2017-0137
Lai, V., Carton, S., Bhatnagar, R., Liao, Q. V., Zhang, Y., & Tan, C. (2022). Human-AI Collaboration via Conditional Delegation: A Case Study of Content Moderation. In S. Barbosa, C. Lampe, C. Appert, D. A. Shamma, S. Drucker, J. Williamson, & K. Yatani (Eds.), CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–18. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501999
Lee, J. D., & See, K. A. (2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human Factors, 46(1): 50–80. https://doi.org/10.1518/hfes.46.1.50_30392
Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.11401
Mitchell, M., Wu, S., Zaldivar, A., Barnes, P., Vasserman, L., Hutchinson, B., Spitzer, E., Raji, I. D., & Gebru, T. (2019). Model Cards for Model Reporting. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 220–229. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287596
Nambisan, S., Lyytinen, K., Majchrzak, A., & Song, M. (2017). Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research in a Digital World. MIS Quarterly, 41(1): 223–238. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2017/41:1.03
National Institute of Standards and Technology (US). (2024). Artificial intelligence risk management framework. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.600-1
Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co‐creating unique value with customers. Strategy & Leadership, 32(3): 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1108/10878570410699249
Raji, I. D., Smart, A., White, R. N., Mitchell, M., Gebru, T., Hutchinson, B., Smith-Loud, J., Theron, D., & Barnes, P. (2020). Closing the AI accountability gap. In M. Hildebrandt, C. Castillo, E. Celis, S. Ruggieri, L. Taylor, & G. Zanfir-Fortuna (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 33–44. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372873
Shneiderman, B. (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 36(6): 495–504. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118
Downloads
Additional Files
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Alexander D. Gelner, Johannes Stahr, Andreas Braun, Alexander Baur

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
