The Future Workplace: Developing the Human-Machine Symbioscape

Abstract

Purpose This paper develops the concept of the human-machine symbioscape to explain how work environments shape collaboration between humans and AI-enabled machines. Extending servicescape thinking from customer-employee encounters to hybrid human-machine work systems, the paper positions environmental design as a core antecedent of human–machine adaptive collaboration, with particular relevance for service and frontline settings where visibility, coordination, and role clarity are critical.

Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual and theory building in nature. It synthesises insights from biological symbiosis, servicescape research, sociotechnical and sociomaterial theory, organisational sensemaking and team adaptation research to develop a deductive typology of the human-machine symbioscape as a three-tiered environmental construct, its cue categories, and its design-critical properties. The framework is further illustrated through a structured coding of relevant human-machine collaboration studies.

Findings The paper conceptualises the symbioscape as a three-tier environmental architecture comprising physical–digital, socio-relational, and institutional–ecosystem conditions. Across these tiers, six cue categories shape what human and AI-enabled actors can notice, how they coordinate work, and how collaborative routines are reinforced over time. Drawing on Weick's sensemaking theory, the framework links these tiers to enactment, selection, and retention processes, and explains how they influence adaptation speed, adaptation effectiveness, and adaptation persistence in human–AI collaboration.

Research limitations/implications The paper is purely conceptual and does not empirically test the proposed relationships. Its evidence base is limited to published studies and illustrative coding, with a strong emphasis on service and frontline contexts. It identifies an agenda for future research around operationalising symbioscape constructs, testing the proposed relationships empirically, and examining how individual tiers and cross-tier configurations jointly affect human–machine work.

Practical implications The symbioscape framework provides managers with a structured lens for designing AI-enabled workplaces. It highlights how deliberate choices in physical–digital visibility and interface design, socio-relational workflow sequencing and interaction load, and institutional governance, training, and role architecture can improve the speed, quality and durability of human–machine adaptation. The framework can be used to diagnose service work environments, where frontline employees must coordinate with intelligent systems under conditions of customer presence, temporal pressure, and operational variability.

Originality/value The paper introduces the symbioscape as a novel, three-tier environmental construct for human–machine collaboration, extending the servicescape from customer–employee encounters to hybrid human–AI work systems. It adds a missing environmental layer to human-machine collaboration research by systematically integrating dispersed insights on context into a coherent framework that links environmental cue structures to sensemaking and adaptation outcomes. For scholars, it offers an integrative conceptual architecture; for practitioners, it provides a foundation for designing and structuring future workplaces that foster adaptive human–machine collaboration.