Goals as a Representational Layer for Human-AI Collaboration

Gaia Molinaro, Lev Tankelevitch, Sean Rintel, Scott Counts

Goals are central to how people, teams, and organizations structure their work. Yet, while generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly operate across a worker's context, information about why a person is pursuing a task, beyond local prompts and interactions, is typically missing. We argue that goals should become an explicit representational layer mediating interactions among people, AI systems, and organizations. Because human goals are hierarchical, partially latent, and dynamically evolving, such a layer must be multidimensional, both grounded in human articulation and inferred from available evidence, and continuously updated. A goal layer could connect immediate requests to broader outcomes, improve the organization and retrieval of relevant context, support reflection and coordination, and provide a foundation for training, aligning, and evaluating AI systems in terms of human-centered outcomes. We highlight these opportunities while identifying open challenges involving goal inference, socio-cognitive frictions, alignment, privacy, and governance.