Is AI going to take your job?

Have you been reading all the buzz this year around generative AI and wondering what it means for your job? If you’re a knowledge worker like me (someone who is paid for the value of their thinking), I personally believe that right now, it’s more about augmentation, not automation, of what you do.

And in the spirit of that wonderful bias, confirmation, here is some research (published this week) that piqued my interest and supported my worldview.

In a collaboration between Harvard, Wharton, MIT and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 758 management consultants at BCG (one of the largest management consultancies on the planet) were asked to complete 18 typical consulting tasks involving skills such as creative problem solving, strategic thinking, decision-making and data analysis.

People were split into three groups:

1. a control group who did not use AI

2. an experimental group who were given permission to use ChatGPT-4

3. a second experimental group that had access to ChatGPT-4 and had a guide to prompt engineering (how to get the most out of the AI).

Here is what the researchers found:

• Consultants using AI were significantly more productive. They completed 12.2% more tasks on average and completed tasks 25.1% more quickly.

• Consultants using AI produced significantly higher quality results - over 40% higher quality compared to the control group.

• The consultants who received access to ChatGPT-4 and the prompt engineering guide had the biggest productivity gains (significantly higher than both groups).

• Lower-performing consultants experienced bigger productivity gains when using ChatGPT-4 compared to the higher-performing consultants. In some cases, they surpassed the performance of their higher-performing peers.

One caveat: don’t let AI make you “fall asleep at the wheel” (as Ethan Mollick, one of the co-authors, puts it). AI is prone to hallucinations (making stuff up) even though it sounds like it knows what it is talking about.

And as a side note: if you lead a team of knowledge workers, drop me a note. My team at Inventium has been deep-diving into how specifically to use AI to boost productivity. If you are after some help, just shout out.

Let me know in the comments how you have been using generative AI in your work and which tools you love the most :)