Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition: A new study suggests AI can be a team player…OpenAI promotes its COO while CEO Sam Altman shifts focus…Apple shakes up its AI team amid frustration over delayed Apple Intelligence features…a revolutionary new AI weather forecasting method…and AI transforms architecture.
Evidence of AI’s positive impact on productivity continues to mount. But while many executives view AI as ultimately a substitute for human labor, hoping it will eventually fully automate tasks and save on headcount, the data suggests that this is not the best way to think about the technology. Yes, in a few cases, AI can fully automate some tasks. But in most cases, today’s AI systems—including the so-called “AI agents” from the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Google—aren’t yet capable or reliable enough to do this. Instead, AI systems should be thought of as a complement to human labor—a way to lift the performance of people, not to replace them.
The latest support for this view comes from a fascinating study by a group of researchers—from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, ESSEC Business School in France, and consumer products giant Procter & Gamble—and published as a working paper on the research repository SSRN. (The authors include Wharton’s Ethan Mollick, who has attracted a huge social media following for his tips on how to use AI effectively in business.)
In 2024, the researchers conducted a one-day virtual product development workshop at P&G, with the process designed to mirror the one that consumer products behemoth famously uses—except this time with an AI twist. In particular, this workshop involved the “seed” stage of product development—which is about brainstorming lots of possible new product ideas and incubating them to the point where a decision can be made on whether to test them at a larger scale. P&G normally assigns two-person teams consisting of one Commercial operations person and one R&D expert to work together on brainstorming ideas. In this case, the researchers took 776 P&G employees from Commercial and R&D and randomly assigned them to do one of the following: work alone; work alone but with access to a generative AI assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model; work in the usual two-person brainstorming team consisting of one Commercial and one R&D person; or work in the usual two-person configuration but with access to the AI assistant.
The groups were then tasked with coming up with new ideas for consumer products in the various P&G divisions in which they worked (baby care, feminine care, grooming, and oral care). These ideas were then assessed by human judges with both relevant business and technology expertise.
AI lifts individual performance—by a lot
Two heads are generally better than one, so it is perhaps not surprising that individuals working alone and without access to AI did the worst. But it turned out that individuals assisted by AI performed, on average, better than two-person teams without AI. In fact, the performance of these AI-assisted individuals was not statistically better than two-person teams working with AI. This might lead one to conclude that AI can indeed be a good substitute for human labor—enabling a company like Procter & Gamble to reduce its two-person product teams to just single individuals brainstorming with the help of AI.
There were some other big benefits to the individuals working with AI, too. Individuals working with AI were able to work faster—taking more than 16% less time to come up with an idea compared to people working without AI, while teams working with AI were about 12% faster.
Working with AI was also better than “bowling alone”—individuals reported more positive emotions and fewer negative ones during the product ideation process than the unassisted lone wolves.
Importantly, people working alone tended to come up with ideas that fit primarily into their professional silos—commercial people favoring product innovations that were mostly about novel commercial ideas (changes in branding, packaging, or marketing strategy) while the R&D specialists favored technological innovations. But when assisted by AI, these individuals achieved blended approaches, combining both technical innovation and commercial innovation—just like the human-human pairings did. “This suggests AI serves not just as an information provider but as an effective boundary-spanning mechanism, helping professionals reason across traditional domain boundaries and approach problems more holistically,” the researchers wrote.
Helping teams to be extraordinary
But, before you jump to the conclusion that AI should be used to reduce team sizes, it is important to point out perhaps the most interesting finding of the whole study: The two person teams working with AI produced far more ideas that the human experts rated as “exceptional”—the 10% that they judged most likely to lead to truly breakout products. And the human teams assisted by AI also reported the most enjoyment from working on the task, compared to the other groups.
Blogging about the findings, Mollick wrote that “organizations have primarily viewed AI as just another productivity tool, like a better calculator or spreadsheet,” but that employees were often using “AI for critical thinking and complex problem solving, not just routine productivity tasks.” AI could be seen as another member of the team—as a collaborator—not just another tool, he wrote. “Companies that focus solely on efficiency gains from AI will not only find workers unwilling to share their AI discoveries for fear of making themselves redundant but will also miss the opportunity to think bigger about the future of work,” he wrote. He encouraged organizations to reimagine work and management structures, not just seek to automate existing processes.
I am sure this is correct. Unfortunately, the temptation for many managers will be to grab at the obvious labor and time savings AI offers, since there is an obvious and immediate pay-off in labor savings. It will take braver executives to argue for keeping people in place but using AI to empower them to be exceptional.
With that, here’s the rest of this week’s AI news.
Jeremy Kahn
[email protected]
@jeremyakahn
Before we get to the news, if you’re interested in learning more about how AI will impact your business, the economy, and our societies (and given that you’re reading this newsletter, you probably are), please consider joining me at the Fortune Brainstorm AI London 2025 conference. The conference is being held May 6-7 at the Rosewood Hotel in London. Confirmed speakers include Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert, eBay chief AI officer Nitzan Mekel, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, noted tech analyst Benedict Evans, and many more. I’ll 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 learn more about that event here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
