In the new study, AI improves both individual and team performance. Will companies take the right lessons from him?
Hello and enjoy the eye at AI. In this edition: A new study shows that AI may be a team of players … While encouraging Openai Coo, CEO Sam changes the focus of Altman… Apple shakes its AI team in disappointment on the delayed Apple intelligence features… A revolutionary AI weather forecasting method… and AI transforms the architecture.
The proof of the positive effect of artificial intelligence on productivity continues to increase. However, while many executives ultimately replace the AI, they will eventually fully automate tasks and save the number of personnel, while the data shows that this is not the best way to think about technology. Yes, in a few cases, AI can fully automate some tasks. In most cases, however, today’s AI Systems-SalesForce, Servicenow, Microsoft and Google’s likes are not talented or reliable enough, including “AI agents”. Instead, AI systems should be considered as a complement of human labor – a way to remove people’s performance, not instead.
The latest support is coming for this view A fascinating work A group of researchers were published by Harvard, Pennsylvania University Wharton School of Business Administration, Essec Business School in France and a work certificate in SSRN by the Giant Procter & Gamble of consumer products. (Writers include Wharton’s Ethan Mollick, who draws a great social media following the clues about how to use AI effectively in the business world.)
In 2024, the researchers carried out a one -day virtual product development workshop in P&G and the process was designed to reflect consumer products. FAMOUS USEThis time with an AI twist. In particular, this workshop included the “seed” stage of the product development, which was about breaking the idea of many possible new product ideas and to the point where it can be decided to test them on a larger scale. P&G normally assigns two teams of two-person teams to work together on brainstorming ideas. In this case, the researchers took 776 P&G employees from Commercial and R -GE and appointed them randomly to make one of the following: Work alone, but access to an productive AI assistant based on Openai’s GPT-4 model; Working in the ordinary two-person brainstorming team, which consists of a commercial and one R & D person; Or in the usual configuration, but work with access to AI assistant.
The groups were then assigned to find new ideas for consumer products in various P&G sections (infant care, feminine care, care and oral care). These ideas were later evaluated by human judges with both relevant business and technology expertise.
AI removes individual performance –
The two heads are usually better than one, so it is not surprising that individuals who work alone and without reaching AI do the worst. However, it was revealed that individuals supported by AI have performed better than two teams without AI. In fact, the performance of these AI -supported individuals was not statistically better than two teams working with AI. This can conclude that AI can really take a good place of human labor-to ensure that a company like Procter & Gamble reduces two-person product teams to the only people who do brainstorming with the help of AI.
Individuals working with artificial intelligence also had other great benefits. Individuals working with AI were able to work faster – to take more than 16% time to find an idea compared to people working without AI, and the teams working with AI were about 12% faster.
Working with artificial intelligence was better than bow Bowling – – individuals reported more positive emotions and less negative emotions than the wolves without help in the product idea process.
More importantly, people working alone tended to find ideas that match professional silos – while RES -GE experts supported technological innovations, mostly commercial people supporting product innovations related to new commercial ideas (brands, packaging or marketing strategy). However, when it was supported by artificial intelligence, these individuals combined both technical innovation and commercial innovation and obtained blended approaches just as human-human matches did. “This shows that AI serves not only as an information provider, but as an effective boundary dissemination mechanism, and helps professionals to reason and approach problems more integrity through the traditional field boundaries,” he said.
Helping teams to be extraordinary
However, before concluding that AI should be used to reduce team dimensions, it is important to point out the most interesting finding of the whole study: the team of two people working with AI produced more ideas that human experts were rated as “extraordinary” -10% decided to really cause breakage products. And Human teams helped by AI reported that he had the most enjoying working on the task compared to other groups.
Blog about findingsMollick wrote that “organizations see AI as another tool of productivity such as a better calculator or electronic table ,, but employees usually“ not only routine efficiency tasks, but they use AI for critical thinking and complex problem solving. They will not only find workers who do not want to share their AI discoveries because they were afraid of bringing them, but they will also miss the opportunity to think more about the future of the work. Edi
I’m sure this is true. Unfortunately, the charm of many executives will be to capture that AI provides obvious labor and time savings because it is an obvious and emergency payment in labor savings. Brave managers will take to discuss keeping people in place, but to use artificial intelligence to make them exceptional.
That’s the rest of this week.
Jeremy Kahn
Jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@Jeremyakahn
Before you start the news, if you want to learn more about how AI will affect your business, your economy and our societies (and considering that you read this newsletter, probably you are probably), please consider attending Fortune’s Brainstorm AI London 2025 Conference. The conference is held on May 6-7 at Rosewood Hotel in London. Approved speakers, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Mastercard Head Product Officer Jorn Lambert, EBAY Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Technology Analyst Benedict Evans and much more. Of course I will be there. I hope to see you there too. You can apply to join here.
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This story initially took part in Fortune.com
