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GenAI Doesn’t Just Increase Productivity. It Expands Capabilities.
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GenAI Doesn’t Just Increase Productivity. It Expands Capabilities.

Daniel Sack, Lisa Krayer, Emma Wiles, Mohamed Abbadi, Urvi Awasthi, Ryan Kennedy, Cristián Arnolds and François Candelon
Boston Consulting Group, 2024
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GenAI tools are expanding the capabilities of workforces, helping organizations unlock value and boost productivity in novel ways — but it can be hard to discern whether GenAI is worth the hype. Researchers from Boston Consulting Group Henderson Institute have put the capabilities of GenAI augmented knowledge workers to the test, discovering that augmented knowledge workers sometimes performed tasks nearly as well as experts, such as data scientists, while delivering results faster. Learn how to leverage the potential of these augmented workers, while mitigating the risks associated with hiring generalists to collaborate with AI.

Summary

GenAI augmented knowledge workers are effectively completing tasks that used to require expert knowledge.

GenAI augmented knowledge workers are entering the talent pool, and they’re faster and more effective than their non-augmented counterparts. These workers are writing code faster than ever before and writing prompts that result in the rapid creation of personalized marketing content — but are they any good? According to a major field experiment led by the Boston Consulting Group Henderson Institute, which tested the effectiveness of this new kind of worker, “the answer is an unequivocal yes.” That said, these knowledge workers do have some limitations. For example, they may struggle to fact-check their work, as they may lack the expertise to know when they’ve gotten it wrong, but leaders who take steps to mitigate these risks can unlock value throughout their organization. 

The research showed that augmented knowledge workers could often help organizations perform tasks that required hiring workers with more expertise in the past, such as those related to data science. In fact, participants were able to perform a task writing Python code...

About the Authors

Daniel Sack, Lisa Krayer, Emma Wiles, Mohamed Abbadi, Urvi Awasthi, Ryan Kennedy, Cristián Arnolds, and François Candelon are professionals at Boston Consulting Group.

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