In Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, a factory worker struggles to keep pace with an ever-accelerating assembly line—until the machine swallows him whole. Nearly 90 years later, Wharton professor Eric Bradlow has the image on his mind. The machines are smarter now. The stakes are higher. And according to a sweeping new joint report from Accenture and the Wharton School, the humans running them are falling behind in a way that should alarm every boardroom in America.
There is a lot of breathless talk of autonomous agents reshaping every corner of corporate America, from handling sales calls to writing code to managing supply chains. But the report from a partnership between Accenture’s global products practice and Wharton’s AI & Analytics Initiative adds evidence of an emerging, inconvenient pattern: the smarter AI gets, the more it demands of the humans behind it.
