Special Issue

Call for Papers Special Issue

“Sustainable Human-AI Collaboration with Generative AI in Intelligent Economy”

on Industrial Management & Data Systems

✦ Introduction

The rapid development of digital technologies, data-driven business models, and algorithmic decision-making is giving rise to a new stage of economic development commonly referred to as the intelligent economy. In contrast to the traditional digital economy, the intelligent economy is characterized by the pervasive integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into production, innovation, service delivery, market exchange, and organizational decision-making.

Empowered by large language models and autonomous agents, generative AI (GAI) differs from earlier forms of AI in that it can generate new content in the form of text, code, images, and videos (Wessel et al., 2025). Within the emerging intelligent economy, GAI can act as an active partner to collaborate with humans toward a shared goal. As a result, it has fundamentally reshaped the modes of organizational operation, user interaction, innovation process, and workplace productivity. 

GAI can raise productivity, improve output quality, and liberate employees from repetitive routine work to concentrate on higher-order problem-solving (Boussioux et al., 2024; Jia et al., 2024; Noy and Zhang, 2023). These benefits are particularly important in the intelligent economy, where competitive advantage increasingly depends on the recombination of human knowledge and machine-generated intelligence. However, human-AI collaboration also brings unprecedented challenges to the development of the sustainability of the intelligent economy. For instance, long-term excessive reliance on such GAI systems may gradually erode individuals’ professional expertise and critical thinking capabilities (Rinta-Kahila et al., 2023). In addition, the widespread adoption of GAI raises concerns regarding accountability, transparency, privacy, unequal access to AI capabilities, etc.

Therefore, it is urgent and essential to explore sustainable human-AI collaboration paradigms that fully leverage GAI’s advantages. Our Special Issue aims to gather cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research to explore how to develop sustainable human-AI collaboration modes with GAI and how such collaboration can shape the future of the intelligent economy.
 

✦ List of Topic Areas
 Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
  • Design of sustainable human-AI collaboration
  • GAI-enabled innovation, ecosystems, and sustainable value creation
  • Human expertise, skills, learning, and professional identity in the intelligent economy
  • Governance, accountability, and audit in human-AI collaboration
  • Privacy, bias, inequality, and security in human-AI collaboration
  • GAI-supported human productivity and creativity
  • Reskilling and job redesign in the GAI era
  • Trust, risk, explainability, and reliability in human-AI collaboration
  • The evolving roles of AI in human-AI collaboration
  • Multi-agent human-AI collaboration and coordination

  • Economic, social, organizational, and environmental outcomes of GAI adoption

✦  Guest Editors

  • Xusen Cheng: xusen.cheng@ruc.edu.cn   Renmin University of China

  • Alex Zarifis: A.Zarifis@soton.ac.uk    University of Southampton

  • Xiaoping Zhang: xiaoping_96@whut.edu.cn  Wuhan University of Technology

✦ Important Dates

  • Opening date for manuscript submissions: 30 March 2027

  • Closing date for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2027

  • Final decision date: 30 June 2028

✦ Submissions

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. The submission URL is available: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/imds

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emerald.com/journals/author-guidance/1627/emerald-publishing-author-guidelines