What Harvard researchers learned about use of AI in white-collar work at top companies
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.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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.
Lower-level workers benefit more, but it is a double-edged sword.
Another experiment D^3 conducted with Boston Consulting Group showed AI leads to more homogenized results. “Humans have more diverse ideas, and people who use AI tend to produce more similar ideas,” Stave said, recognizing that companies with goals of standing out in the market should lean into human-led creativity.
Performers on the lower half of the skill spectrum exhibit the biggest performance gains (43%) when equipped with AI compared to performers on the top half of the skill spectrum (who get a 17% performance surge). While both outcomes are substantial, it’s the entry-level workers who get the biggest perks.
But for the less-skilled workers, it’s a double-edged sword. For instance, if AI can do junior work better, the senior-level workplace might stop delegating work to their junior counterparts, creating training deficits that negatively impact future performance. Bearing a company’s future in mind, businesses will want to carefully consider what they do and don’t delegate.
Human managers are not prepared to oversee AI agents. They need to learn
While Stave says humans serving as managers to a suite of AI agents is “absolutely going to happen,” the scaffolding to do so both effectively and with minimal adverse harm is simply not there. Stave herself has had this experience, and it contrasted with all her managerial and leadership education. “You learn how to manage according to empathy and understanding, how to make the most of human potential,” she said. “I had all these AI agents that I was personally trying to build and manage. It was a fundamentally different experience.”
Moreover, while Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra said entry-level workers could be the new managers (with AI agents — not people — in their charge), the junior workforce has not actually proven to be enterprise AI-native or managerially equipped. “We want to see AI giving humans more opportunity to flourish. The challenge I have is with assuming that the junior employees are going to step in and know how to do that right away,” Stave said.
She added that the companies truly getting value from their AI deployments are the ones undertaking process redesign. Instead of relying on AI notetaking to save time, lean into where AI helps and where humans are the winners. “It’s very easy to buy a tool and implement it,” she said. “It’s really hard to actually do org redesign, because that’s when you get into all these internal empires and power struggles.”
But even so, she says, the effort is worth it.
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI is in discussions with Amazon about a potential investment and an agreement to use its artificial intelligence chips, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday.
The details are fluid and still subject to change but the investment could exceed $10 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential. The Information first reported on the potential deal.
The discussions come after OpenAI completed a restructuring in October and formally outlined the details of its partnership with Microsoft, giving it more freedom to raise capital and partner with companies across the broader AI ecosystem.
Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and backed the company since 2019, but it no longer has a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider, according to an October release. OpenAI can now also develop some products with third parties.
Amazon has invested at least $8 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic, but the e-commerce giant could be looking to expand its exposure to the booming generative AI market. Microsoft has taken a similar step and announced last month that it will invest up to $5 billion into Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion in the startup.
Amazon Web Services has been designing its own AI chips since around 2015, and the hardware has become crucial for AI companies that are trying to train models and meet growing demand for compute. AWS announced its Inferentia chips in 2018, and the latest generation of its Trainium chips earlier this month.
OpenAI has made more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure commitments in recent months, including agreements with chipmakers Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom. Last month, OpenAI signed a deal to buy $38 billion worth of capacity from AWS, its first contract with the leader in cloud infrastructure leader.
In October, OpenAI finalized a secondary share sale totaling $6.6 billion, allowing current and former employees to sell stock at a $500 billion valuation.
WATCH: Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide
Waymo co-CEOs (L-R): Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov
Waymo
Self-driving car company Waymo is in talks to raise $15 billion in funding in the new year.
The robotaxi company plans to raise billions from Alphabet, its parent company, as well as outside investors at a valuation as high as $110 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
The latest funding discussions are indicative of Waymo’s status as the leader of the pack in the U.S. robotaxi market. The company has been spending heavily to ramp up its fleet and continue expanding to more regions. Waymo is now either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles in 26 markets, in the U.S. and abroad.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Waymo will “meaningfully” contribute to Alphabet’s financials as soon as 2027, CNBC reported Tuesday.
If the Google sister company winds up raising as much as $15 billion, that would represent more than double the amount of its last funding round. That was a series C round of $5.6 billion at a $45 billion valuation, which closed in October 2024. Alphabet had committed $5 billion in a multiyear investment to Waymo at the time.
That round was led by Alphabet alongside previous backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price. At the time, Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said the funding would go toward expanding its robotaxi service.
Waymo currently serves paid rides to the public in the Austin, San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets.
Earlier this month, CNBC reported that Waymo crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and the company in December said it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.
The company plans to open service next year in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington, D.C. Waymo also announced plans to launch its service in London in 2026, which will mark the company’s first overseas service region.
Amazon’s Zoox this year began offering free driverless rides to the public around the Las Vegas Strip and certain San Francisco neighborhoods. Tesla launched a Robotaxi-branded service in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, but those cars still had human drivers or safety supervisors on board as of mid-December.
Fundraising plans were first reported by The Information.
WATCH: 2025: The year that the robotaxi went mainstream with Waymo leading the pack
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