Source: Yokoi et al. (2026) — “Organizing Across Cognitive Asymmetry in Human-AI Collaboration: A Study of Perfume Creation,” Strategic Management Journal
Perfume creation is such a perfect place to study human-AI collaboration.
Because perfume is not just a formula. It is memory, taste, culture, body, mood, and someone saying “this smells like late afternoon in a hotel lobby” as if that is a normal operational requirement.
This paper studies human-AI collaboration in perfume creation and introduces the idea of cognitive asymmetry. Humans have tacit, embodied knowledge. AI has codified knowledge. Both can be powerful, but they do not naturally speak the same language.
That creates a representational gap.
I love that phrase because it explains so many AI projects.
The human knows something but cannot fully express it. The AI produces something but does not fully understand the world behind the request. Between them sits a gap full of prompts, revisions, misunderstandings, and occasionally something interesting.
The study identifies representational integration as the organising process that bridges the gap. Humans and GenAI coordinate by allocating tasks based on their cognitive advantages, converting knowledge between tacit and codified forms, and steering outputs as the problem evolves.
In simpler terms: humans translate taste into instructions, AI turns codified knowledge into options, and humans keep steering because the work changes as it unfolds.
That feels like the real future of creative AI.
Not AI replacing human taste. Not humans ignoring AI. More like a strange collaboration where the human keeps translating the unsayable into something the machine can work with.
My takeaway: human-AI collaboration needs translation work. The value is not only in the output. It is in learning how to move between human intuition and machine representation without losing the thing that made the work meaningful in the first place.