Study: Access to AI Boosted Consultants’ Job Performance 🧠

What we’re showing

This chart highlights the results of a Harvard Business School study on how using AI (specifically GPT-4) can help people do their jobs better.

The study was conducted with employees of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a leading management consulting firm.

The specifics

These performance gains are based on tasks that researchers considered to be “within the frontier of AI capabilities”. This included brainstorming innovative concepts for new products.

The study also looked at how AI impacted performance on tasks “outside the AI frontier”. In other words, these are tasks that GPT-4 is not able to complete through simple prompts.

One such task required consultants to cross-examine quantitative data from a spreadsheet alongside insights from recorded interviews.

In these tasks, consultants who used AI were 19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions compared to those without AI.