Centaurs and cyborgs
Definition
Centaurs and cyborgs are two ways people work with AI. Centaurs split a task, handing some parts to AI and keeping others, while cyborgs work with AI continuously, passing small pieces back and forth.
By Ronan Liedmeier, fractional head of growth and course author · Published 17 October 2026 · Last updated 17 October 2026
Also called: centaur and cyborg AI use
Ethan Mollick, a co-author of the 2023 Boston Consulting Group study that named the jagged frontier, used the labels for the two approaches that consultants who did well with AI seemed to follow. They give a team words for how a person and the AI share a task, and that split decides where mistakes get caught.
How it works
Mollick describes centaur work as having "a clear line between person and machine." A centaur decides which parts of a task to hand over and which to keep, usually keeping the judgment and handing over drafting, formatting or summarizing.
Cyborgs, in his words, "blend machine and person." They work in small exchanges: ask for a paragraph, rewrite half of it, ask the AI to challenge a claim, paste in a number, continue.
Both can work well. The pattern that causes trouble is a third one, where the person hands over the whole task, including the checking.
Example
A paid-media manager writes a quarterly performance report. Working as a centaur, she reads the numbers and decides what happened herself, then gives AI her bullet notes to turn into readable prose. Working as a cyborg, she drafts the commentary with AI line by line, asking it to tighten a sentence, pushing back when it overstates a result, and feeding it the exact figures as she goes.
Common mistake
Treating one mode as right for everything. On tasks near the edge of what AI handles well, a centaur split keeps the decision with the person who can check it. Cyborg work on those same tasks can slide into accepting each small suggestion unread.
Learn it in AI Academy
- Humans on the Jagged FrontierExpert · 9 min
Related terms
- Jagged technological frontier
- The jagged technological frontier is the uneven edge of what AI does well: it improves results on some tasks and makes them worse on others, even when the tasks look equally hard. The term comes from a 2023 Harvard Business School study of consultants using AI.
- Human in the loop
- Human in the loop is a setup where an AI system pauses at set points so a person can approve or correct its work before it takes effect. It is used for actions that are hard to undo, such as sending emails to customers or moving money.
- AI workflow
- An AI workflow is a fixed series of steps, set in advance by a person or by code, in which an AI model handles one or more of the steps. The steps run in the same order every time, which makes a workflow easy to test and check.