Anthony Onesto breaks down a Nature study on human-AI teams. The surprise: when humans started stronger than AI, they synergized. When AI started stronger, adding humans made things worse. Simply pairing them helps humans on average, but building actual super teams takes careful task design.
Hey everyone, it's Anthony Ernesto and this is my latest drop of AI in HR today. There was research done by nature.com to look at the combination of AI and humans, which is better? And I know I talk a lot about Race against the Machines, a book written 12 plus years ago by two MIT economic professors that came out with at the end, a love story that the best combination is both. Now this research showed a couple of things. Let's look at the numbers. When comparing human AI teams to the best performer, whether it's human or the AI, the average result was negative, meaning that combining the two against the best performing human or AI, it was showed underperformance. Human augmentation. When they compared human AI teams to just humans alone, the average result was positive, showing a consistent boost. If you're adding AI to the human versus the humans alone, there's definitely a performance increase. But who's better is probably what people are asking for. And when humans initially outperformed AI, the team often achieved synergy. But when AI initially outperformed the humans, the team performed worse than the AI alone. So what's the takeaway here? Simply just adding AI helping humans is a positive. But reaching peak performance goes beyond just combining the two. It really requires more nuance. And we're starting to see this overall trend of AI is just going to replace humans. A lot of snake oil folks that are talking about this stuff, we see the CEO of Shopify and I don't think this is a bad idea because you have to think about how is AI augmenting humans, but saying that we're not hiring anybody or you know, headcount is going to be reduced. HR really needs to lead this digital transformation because what we see in this research is that just by adding AI, yes there's outperformance, but if you want true performance or peak performance, it's really, really nuance. You have to look at the tasks, you have to look at creation, all these sort of things. Read my latest blog post. The title of the blog post is Human AI Collaboration. Can we create super teams? To get more information and subscribe today to my newsletter and this is my latest drop in AI and HR today. We'll see you soon.
