Are AI teammates helping or hurting your team’s success?
In a study featured in Harvard Business Review, Columbia Business School Professor Bruce Kogut and his colleagues explored how AI teammates affect team performance and found that it often leads to a surprising outcome: team performance drops. Using the video game Super Mario Party: Dash and Dine for their experiment, the researchers discovered that teams with an AI member consistently collected fewer ingredients than those with all-human players.
This article reveals a critical challenge for organizations integrating AI: the presence of AI can disrupt team dynamics, reduce motivation, and erode trust among human members. Even teams that were not directly affected by the AI replacement experienced a drop in performance—a phenomenon Kogut calls the “spillover effect.” These findings suggest that introducing AI into teams requires careful planning to avoid unintended negative impacts on productivity.
Read the full article to learn more about how AI impacts team performance and how it effectively be integrated into a company’s workforce.
Mentioned Faculty
Bruce Kogut
Bruce Kogut is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He teaches courses on Governance, Governance and Ethics, and Business Strategies and Solving Social Problems. He has taught in executive programs in the US, Europe, and China.