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.”
Business representatives staff a table at a career fair in Harlem hosted by Assemblymember Jordan Wright on Dec. 10, 2025, in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
The U.S. November jobs report has something for everybody.
Those convinced of weakness will highlight the higher-than-expected unemployment rate as well as the number of jobs shrinking in October.
On the other hand, proponents of a strong economy will focus on jobs growth in November beating estimates, and point out that the increase in the unemployment rate was mostly because the labor force grew, as CNBC’s Jeff Cox noted.
Without any definitive judgment that can be made on the state of the labor market, traders left their bets on interest rate cuts in January mostly unchanged. It’s currently at 25.5%, around one percentage point higher than before the release of the November jobs report, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
“Today’s data paints a picture of an economy catching its breath,” said Gina Bolvin, president at Bolvin Wealth Management Group. “Job growth is holding on, but cracks are forming. Consumers are still standing, but not sprinting.”
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.
Shares of Chinese chipmaker MetaX Integrated Circuits soared about 700% in their market debut in Shanghai on Wednesday, after the company raised nearly $600 million in its initial public offering.
Shares, which were priced at 104.66 yuan in the IPO, surged to over 835 yuan on debut, marking a 697% jump.
Similar to Moore Threads, which saw a robust debut at the start of the month, MetaX develops graphics processing units for artificial intelligence applications, tapping into a fast-growing sector driven by rising adoption of AI services.
MetaX is part of a growing cohort of local chipmakers building AI processors, reflecting Beijing’s push to reduce dependence on U.S. chips following Washington’s tech curbs on export of high-end technology to China.
Washington has imposed export curbs on U.S. chip behemoth Nvidia, barring sales of its most advanced AI chips to China.
Newer Chinese players such as Enflame Technology and Biren Technology have also entered the AI space, aiming to capture a share of the billions in graphics processing unit, or GPU, demand no longer served by Nvidia. Chinese regulators have also been clearing more semiconductor IPOs in their drive for greater AI independence.
Earlier this month, shares of Moore Threads, a Beijing-based GPU manufacturer often referred to as “China’s Nvidia,” soared by more than 400% on its debut in Shanghai following its $1.1 billion listing.
Macquarie’s equity analyst Eugene Hsiao said investor enthusiasm around Chinese AI-chip IPOs such as MetaX is partly shaped by longer-term expectations that China will build a self-sufficient semiconductor ecosystem as tensions with the U.S. persist.
“For that to work, you need these players. You need names like Moore Threads, Meta X, etc,” he said.
“So I think when investors are looking at these IPOs, they implicitly are thinking about the nationalistic element,” Hsiao noted, adding that the main driver of the frenzy, however, was the firms’ growth potential.