The Baker Library of the Harvard Business School on the Harvard University campus in Boston, Massachusetts, US, on Tuesday, May 27, 2025. Recent research conducted by the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School is investigating where AI is most effective in increasing productivity and performance — and where humans still have the upper hand.
Workplace AI adoption is at an all-time high, according to Anthropic data, but just because organizations use AI doesn't mean it's effective.
"Nobody knows those answers, even though a lot of people are saying they do," said Jen Stave, chief operator at the Digital Data Design Institute (D^3) at Harvard Business School. While much of the business world tries to figure out where AI can be best deployed, the team at D^3 is researching where the technology is most effective in increasing productivity and performance — and where humans still have the upper hand.
Workplace collaboration is a long-held standard for innovation and productivity, but AI is changing what that looks like. AI-equipped individuals perform at comparable levels to teams without access to AI, D^3's recent research in partnership with Procter & Gamble finds. "AI is capable of reproducing certain benefits typically gained through human collaboration, potentially revolutionizing how organizations structure their teams and allocate resources," according to the research.
Think AI-enabled teams, not just AI-equipped individuals.
While AI-equipped individuals show significant improvement in factors like speed and performance, strategically curated teams with AI have their own advantages. When factoring in the quality of outcomes, the best, most innovative solutions come from AI-enabled teams. This research relies on AI tools not optimized for collaboration, but AI systems purpose-built for collaboration could further enhance these benefits. In other words, simply replacing humans with AI may not be the fix businesses hope for.
"Companies that are actually thinking through the changes in roles and where we need to not just lean into it but protect human jobs and maybe even add some in that space if that's our competitive advantage, that, to me, is a signal of a super mature mindset around AI," Stave said.
The D^3 experiment at P&G also shows that AI integration significantly reduces gaps that exist between an organization's pockets of domain expertise. For example, having a knowledge base at hand could make any one team's outputs more universally beneficial beyond sole teams like human resources, engineering and research and development.