At the annual Directors & Boards Character of the Corporation summit in New York last month, a panel of corporate directors discussed AI and its impact on risk and people. They recognized the vastness and complexity of the topic as well as how quickly it is changing. Effective leaders stay on top of new learnings and incorporate them into their practices.
For example, a study published this month by Aiden Toner-Rodgers of MIT, Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation, challenges earlier research that suggested AI is most helpful to employees who use basic skills and perform basic tasks in their jobs. The new MIT paper shows the most skilled scientists and innovators benefitted the most from AI – doubling their productivity – while lower-skilled staff did not experience similar gains.
This appears counter to previous studies. For example, a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Erik Brynjolfsson et al. showed that low-skilled call-center workers demonstrated significant improvements when using AI, while higher-skilled workers did not demonstrate similar benefits. A 2023 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study showed similar findings, as lower-skilled consultants increased their performance by 43% when using AI augmentation tools in comparison to 17% for higher-skilled consultants.
Why the difference in results? As it turns out, the benefit of AI augmentation varies depending upon the kind of task and the employee’s level of skills and proficiency:
- Routine tasks: AI tools tend to enhance the performance of lower-skilled employees more than they do for higher-skilled employees.
- Tasks involving more advanced human judgment (such as innovation, research and development, and advanced programming): AI tools tend to enhance the performance of higher-skilled employees more than lower-skilled employees.
Further research published by BCG in 2023 and 2024 was consistent with this finding, as was a report by Evercore ISI and Professor David Shrier showing AI impacts jobs differently based on the type of work and who is doing that work.
How can boards and senior management teams use the knowledge gained in these studies to inform AI governance, risk management and decision making?
Effective leaders take the following six actions:
Together, the various studies highlight the transformative potential of AI while underscoring the critical role of senior management and boards in shaping implementation to maximize productivity, creativity and impact.
A version of this article originally appeared on Forbes on November 27, 2024.
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