"When to Hand Off, When to Work Together": Expanding Human-Agent Co-Creative Collaboration through Concurrent Interaction

TL;DR

This paper explores how human-agent collaboration evolves with shared workspace visibility, introducing CLEO to improve agent awareness and analyzing interaction patterns to enhance concurrent co-creation.

Contribution

It introduces CLEO, a novel agent capability for context-aware interpretation of concurrent actions, and provides a taxonomy and decision model for collaborative interaction modes.

Findings

Concurrent interaction occurred in 31.8% of turns.

CLEO effectively distinguishes user feedback from independent work.

A taxonomy of five action patterns and ten codes was developed.

Abstract

As agents move into shared workspaces and their execution becomes visible, human-agent collaboration faces a fundamental shift from sequential delegation to concurrent co-creation. This raises a new coordination problem: what interaction patterns emerge, and what agent capabilities are required to support them? Study 1 (N=10) revealed that process visibility naturally prompted concurrent intervention, but exposed a critical capability gap: agents lacked the collaborative context awareness needed to distinguish user feedback from independent parallel work. This motivated CLEO, a design probe that embodies this capability, interpreting concurrent user actions as feedback or independent work and adapting execution accordingly. Study 2 (N=10) analyzed 214 turn-level interactions, identifying a taxonomy of five action patterns and ten codes, along with six triggers and four enabling factors explaining when and why users shift between collaboration modes. Concurrent interaction appeared in 31.8% of turns. We present a decision model, design implications, and an annotated dataset, positioning concurrent interaction as what makes delegation work better.