The agentic shift: Making human-AI coordination work by addressing two critical junctures

Organizations increasingly adopt AI to enhance innovation, yet many initiatives underdeliver - not because the technology fails, but because coordination between humans and AI breaks down. This paper develops a framework reconceptualizing AI as a teammate rather than a tool. Analyzing 37 empirical studies, we identify five coordination breakpoints that trace back to two critical junctures: directional alignment fails, when humans and AI pursue different goals, and information integrity fails, when meaning degrades as tasks move across human-AI boundaries. Building on these insights, we introduce a Practical Coordination Playbook that provides targeted interventions across five organizational domains - including capability boundary mapping workshops, executive strategy alignment sessions, and multi-channel data integration systems. Conceptually, the paper unifies fragmented accounts of implementation challenges into a parsimonious model; managerially, it provides guidance for converting possible breakpoints into deliberate teaming capabilities; methodologically, it offers a transparent, reproducible synthesis of the empirical record. Taken together, the findings highlight that the future of human-AI innovation depends not only on more powerful systems but on how organizations design the conditions for AI to act as a trusted teammate.