Teaming Up With an AI Agent: Training Humans to Develop Human-Agent Teamwork Skills

This study investigated whether humans can be efficiently trained in human-agent teams (HATs) teamwork competencies to improve HAT collaboration. In HATs, humans and artificially intelligent (AI) agents collaborate on shared tasks, which requires teamwork. However, human and agent approaches to teamwork differ, posing challenges in HATs. These challenges raise the need to train humans to develop teamwork competencies that they can effectively apply in HAT settings. The cooperative video game, KeyWe, was used as a testbed, in which human participants completed tasks with a scripted agent. A HAT training intervention that took less than 30 minutes was developed to train humans on seven teamwork competencies. The training was not associated with the KeyWe game task itself. Half of the participants received the training, and half did not. Participants who received the training delegated a higher percentage of tasks to the agent and more often assigned tasks to the agent by defining strategies than participants who did not receive teamwork training. Trained teams demonstrated resilience by achieving higher task performance when the game difficulty increased. This study demonstrated that training humans to develop teamwork competencies, independent from task training, can enhance collaboration and performance in HATs.