SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

From Task Success to Productive Success: Evaluating Human-AI Collaboration by Quality and Cost

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 17, 2026 · UTC

AI productivity is often measured by task completion time, economic value, or improvements in outcome quality. However, these measures usually treat collaboration as a black box where they capture what output was produced, but not the interaction cost required to produce it. Motivated by economics literature, we introduce a productivity-oriented framework for evaluating human-AI collaboration as outcome quality relative to interaction cost. Across two datasets spanning four tasks, we show that: (1) sessions with identical quality ratings can differ by up to 70 times in interaction cost; (2) qu

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global