From AI Assistants to AI Teammates: A Systematic Review of Human–AI Collaboration in Product Strategy and Innovation Management

Generative and Agentic AI (GenAI & Agentic AI) are changing the nature of how AI is used in the organization from a supportive role to a more active partner and teammate. This systematic review investigates the impact of collaboration between humans and AI on product strategy and innovation management and focuses specifically on the shift from AI assistants to increasingly independent AI teammates. This review brings together the research in the field of market and customer intelligence, opportunity identification, strategic prioritization, product road mapping, ideation, new product development, experimentation, new product innovation evaluation, and implementation, supported by AI. It also explores the organizational and behavioral aspects that impact successful human–AI teaming, such as task distribution, the complementarity of human and AI intelligence, calibration of trust, explainability, communication, autonomy of AI, human oversight, accountability, and creativity. The review suggests that when used alongside human expertise, AI can enhance analysis, decision making, speed up the process of innovation, generate ideas and support organizations in learning. The rise in AI autonomy brings a host of potential issues on the table – hallucination, algorithmic bias, overreliance, privacy, IP rights, security, loss of expertise, and agentic behavior are just a few. The review thus proposes a comprehensive Human–AI Teammate Framework that connects human and AI competencies, tasks and organizations, collaboration processes, AI autonomy and decision authority, team results, and governance. The framework emphasizes that product professionals are becoming increasingly important as the AI orchestrators who are coordinating human skills and more autonomous AI systems. Lastly, the review highlights the research gap in relation to Agentic AI, decision authority, calibration of trust, creativity, governance and cross-industry and cross-cultural implementation.