AI improves individual and team performance, according to a new study. Will companies learn the good lessons?

Hello and welcome to AI. In this edition: a new study suggests that AI can be a team player … Openai promotes its COO while CEO Sam Altman moves Focus … Apple shakes its AI team in the middle of the frustration of delayed features of Apple intelligence … A new revolutionary method of weather forecast of AI … and AI transform architecture.

The evidence of the positive impact of AI on productivity continues to rise. But while many leaders consider AI as ultimately a substitute for human work, hoping that it will eventually automate tasks and save workforce, data suggest that this is not the best way to think of technology. Yes, in a few cases, AI can fully automate certain tasks. But in most cases, today’s AI systems – including the so -called “AI” agents of tastes Dirty,, Serve,, MicrosoftAnd Google – are not yet sufficiently capable or reliable to do this. Instead, AI systems should be considered a complement to human work – a way to lift people’s performance, not to replace them.

The last support for this view has just A fascinating study By a group of researchers – Harvard, the Wharton School of Business from the University of Pennsylvania, the ESSEC business school in France and the Consumer Products Products Procter & Gamble – and published as a working document on the SSRN research benchmark. (The authors include Ethan Mollick from Wharton, who attracted a huge social media to follow for his advice on how to use effective business AI).)

In 2024, the researchers organized a one -day virtual product development workshop at P&G, with the process designed to reflect that of the consumer products giant Famous use– Except this time with an AI touch. In particular, this workshop involved the “seed” stage of product development – which concerns the brainstorming of many possible ideas of new products and incubate them to the point where a decision can be made on the opportunity to test them on a larger scale. P&G normally affects teams to two people made up of a person of commercial operations and an R&D expert to work together on brainstorming ideas. In this case, the researchers took 776 P&G employees of advertising and R&D and assigned them at random to make one of the following elements: work alone; Work alone but with access to a generative AI assistant based on the OPENAI GPT-4 model; Work in the usual brainstorming team of two people made up of a commercial person and a R&D person; Or work in the usual configuration for two people but with access to the AI ​​assistant.

The groups were then responsible for offering new consumer products ideas in the various P&G divisions in which they worked (babies, female care, grooming and oral care). These ideas were then evaluated by human judges with relevant commercial and technological matters.

AI raises individual performance – many

Two heads are generally better than one, it is therefore not surprising that individuals working alone and without access to AI do the worst. But it turned out that individuals helped by AI occurred, on average, better than the teams of two people without AI. In fact, the performance of these AI assisted people was not statistically worse than the teams of two people working with AI. This could lead to concluding that AI can indeed be a good substitute for human work – allowing a company like Procter & Gamble to reduce its teams of products to two people to single people who are reflected using AI.

People working with AI also had other advantages with AI. People working with AI were able to work faster, which made more than 16% less time to find an idea compared to people working without AI, while the teams working with AI were about 12% faster.

Working with AI was also better than “Bowling alone” – individuals reported more positive emotions and fewer negatives during the product ideation process than non -assisted solitary wolves.

Above all, people working alone were tend to offer ideas that mainly correspond to their professional silos – commercial people promoting product innovations that mainly concerned commercial ideas (changes in brand image, packaging or marketing strategy) while R&D specialists favored technological innovations. But when they are assisted by AI, these people have obtained mixed approaches, combining both technical innovation and commercial innovation, as are human human agreements. “This suggests that AI serves not only as an information supplier, but as an effective spanning mechanism, helping professionals to reason through the traditional limits of the field and to approach problems in a more global way,” wrote researchers.

Help teams to be extraordinary

But, before jumping to the conclusion that AI should be used to reduce the size of the teams, it is important to emphasize perhaps the most interesting discovery of the entire study: the two teams working with AI produced many more ideas than human experts have deemed “exceptional” – the 10% they have deemed the most likely to lead to real breakdown products. And the human teams helped by AI also reported the most pleasure by working on the task, compared to other groups.

Blog on resultsMollick wrote that “organizations have mainly considered AI as another productivity tool, as a better calculator or better calculation sheet”, but that employees often used “AI for critical thinking and resolution of complex problems, not just routine productivity tasks”. AI could be considered another member of the team – as a collaborator – not only another tool, he wrote. “Companies that focus only on AI efficient gains will not only find workers who do not want to share their AI discoveries for fear of redundant, but will also miss the opportunity to think about the future of work,” he wrote. He encouraged organizations to reinvent work and management structures, not only to seek to automate existing processes.

I’m sure it’s correct. Unfortunately, the temptation for many managers will be to seize the offers of the workforce of the workforce and the duration, because there is an obvious and immediate reimbursement of the savings in labor. It will take leaders to brave to plead to keep people in place, but use AI to allow them to be exceptional.

With that, here are the rest of the news from this week.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@Jeremyakahn

Before bringing the news, if you want to know more about the impact of AI which will have an impact Fortune Brainstorm ai London 2025 conference. The conference is held from May 6 to 7 at Rosewood Hotel in London. Confirmed speakers include CEO of Cohere, Aidan Gomez, Mastercard Product Director Jorn Lambert, ebay The director of AI Nitzan Mekel, the partner of Sequoia, Shaun Maguire, noted the technological analyst Benedict Evans, and many others. I will be there, of course. I hope to see you there too. You can apply to attend here.

And if I miss you in London, why not consider joining me in Singapore on July 22 and 23 for Fortune Brainstorm ai Singapore. You can know more about this event here.

This story was initially presented on Fortune.com

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