“when artificial intelligence is used within the boundary of its capabilities, it can improve a worker’s performance by as much as 40%…” “But when AI is used outside that boundary to complete a task, worker performance drops by an average of 19 percentage points.”
A new study on the impact of generative AI on highly skilled workers finds that when artificial intelligence is used within the boundary of its capabilities, it can improve a worker’s performance by as much as 40% compared with workers who don’t use it. But when AI is used outside that boundary to complete a task, worker performance drops by an average of 19 percentage points. The findings have implications not only for worker productivity but for organizations looking to successfully navigate what the researchers have termed the “jagged technological frontier” of AI — specifically, generative pretrained transformers (GPT), which produce text after being given prompts. Understanding the upper limits of AI’s abilities is imperative, particularly as those abilities continue to expand, the researchers write. It’s important for managers to maintain awareness of this jagged frontier, said Harvard Business School’s Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, the lead author of the paper, because the researchers found that it was not obvious to highly skilled knowledge workers which of their everyday tasks could easily be performed by AI and which tasks would require a different approach. A multidisciplinary team of researchers, including MIT Sloan’s Kate Kellogg, authored the paper. https://lnkd.in/egm-4u_Q