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.
