As generative AI rapidly spreads through organizations, executives face a deceptively simple question: How should humans work with AI? The common answer—”keep humans in the loop”—sounds reassuring.
But new research reveals that this answer is dangerously incomplete. What appears to be the same “human-in-the-loop” approach actually manifests in three radically different ways, with profoundly different implications for performance and skill development.
To understand how companies can truly extract value from human-AI collaboration, we conducted a field experiment with 244 consultants using GPT-4 for a complex business problem-solving task. With support from scholars at Harvard Business School, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Wharton School, and Warwick Business School, the experiment analyzed nearly 5,000 human-AI interactions to answer a critical question: When humans collaborate with GenAI, what are they actually doing—and what should they be doing?
