Study shows human-AI teams achieve higher individual productivity compared to human teams
Pairing up AI agents with employees can improve productivity by 60%, according to a new study.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently carried out a study seeking to understand the impact of AI agents on productivity, performance, and work processes.
AI agents, as defined by Google Cloud, are software systems that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They can show reasoning, planning, and memory, as well as have a level of autonomy to make decisions and adapt.
To uncover the technology's impact, the MIT researchers randomly assigned more than 2,000 humans to work with either other humans or AI agents and asked them to produce ads for a large think tank.
Human-human teams produced higher-quality images, but humans on human-AI teams sent 23% fewer social messages and created 60% greater productivity per worker and higher-quality ad copy.
"We demonstrate that Human-AI teams communicate more, focus on task-related content, and achieve higher individual productivity compared to Human-Human teams," the report read.
"While collaboration with AI agents enhances text quality, it introduces trade-offs in multimodal outputs like images."
The report also noted that AI personality traits, namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, can also impact productivity.
Conscientious humans paired with open AI agents improved image quality, it noted.
However, extroverted humans paired with conscientious AI agents reduced the quality of text, images, and clicks.
Harang Ju, a postdoc associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the authors of the report, said their study proved that the same kinds of AI agents might not work for everyone.
"Personalised AI, we believe that that's going to be a huge thing," Ju told Bloomberg. "So not everyone's going to get the same AI, like you don't work with every one of your coworkers the same. Everyone's different, and so AI should be different too."
The findings come in the wake of widespread adoption of AI tools in workplaces. White House AI czar David Sacks even noted that AI agents will get better when it comes to capabilities.
But AI agents' introduction has raised concerns over their impact on the job market, with Sacks stating that agents will likely be there to replace some parts of human jobs to make them more productive.
