Harvard Business School: The Cybernetic Teammate

Harvard Business School: The Cybernetic Teammate

With The Cybernetic Teammate, Harvard Business School presents a field experiment on the real impact of generative AI in team constellations. In an experiment with over 750 participants at Procter & Gamble, different work settings were compared – individuals and teams, both with and without AI support. The aim was to measure the effects on performance, collaboration and emotional reactions.

The results are clear: teams with AI support not only achieved the highest average solution quality, but also achieved top performance more than three times as often as the control group – including purely human teams.

Particularly relevant: Individuals with AI achieve the same quality level as human teams without AI – and are 16.4% faster on average. This is a significant efficiency lever for communication units with limited resources and high cycle times. It also shows that AI facilitates the integration of technical and commercial perspectives, brings together different points of view in a structured way and leads to more balanced solutions – a key challenge in cross-functional communication teams.

An additional aspect with an impact on leadership and change processes: AI-supported teams report significantly higher positive emotions and less anxiety – a strong argument for the targeted, non-anxiety-driven use of generative systems.