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Applications of artificial intelligence (AI), such as virtual and physical service robots, generative AI, large language models and decision support systems, alter the nature of services. Most service research centers on the division between human and AI resources. Less attention has been paid to analyzing the entangled resource relations and interactions between humans and AI entities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to extend our metatheoretical understanding of resource integration and value cocreation by analyzing different human–AI resource relations in service ecosystems.

The conceptual paper adapts a novel framework from postphenomenology, specifically cyborg intentionality. This framework is used to analyze what kinds of human–AI resource relations enable resource integration and value cocreation in service ecosystems.

We conceptualize seven different human–AI resource relations, namely background, embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, cyborg, immersion and composite relation. The sociotechnical entangled perspective on human–AI resource relations challenges and reframes our understanding of interactions between humans and nonhumans in resource integration and value cocreation and the distinction between operant and operand resources in service research.

Our primary contribution to researchers and service providers is dissolving the distinction between operant and operand resources. We present two foundational propositions. 1. Humans and AI become entangled value cocreating resources in inherently sociotechnical service ecosystems; and 2. Human and AI entanglements in value cocreation manifest through seven resource relations in inherently sociotechnical service ecosystems. Understanding the combinatorial potential of different human–AI resource relations enables service providers to make informed choices in service ecosystems.

Future is rarely explicitly addressed or problematized in business network research. This study aims to examine the possibilities of developing a business actor’s future orientation to network studies and imports ideas and concepts from futures research to support the development.

The study is conceptual and interdisciplinary. The authors critically analyze how extant studies grounded in the sensemaking view and process research approach integrate future time and how theoretical myopia hinders the adoption of a future orientation.

The prevailing future perspective is restricted to managers’ perceptions and actions at present, ignoring the anticipation and exploration of alternative longer-term futures. Future time is generally conceived as embedded in managers’ cognitive processes or is seen as part of the ongoing interaction, where the time horizon to the future is not noticed or is at best short.

To enable a forward-looking perspective, researchers should move the focus from expectation building in business interaction to purposeful preparation of alternative future(s) and from the view of seeing future as enacted in the present to envisioning of both near-term and more distant futures.

This study addresses the growing need of business actors to anticipate future developments in the rapidly changing market conditions and to innovate and change business practices to save the planet for future generations.

This study elaborates on actors’ future orientation to business markets and networks, proposes the integration of network research concepts with concepts from futures studies and poses new types of research questions for future research.