HBS x Procter & Gamble

Harvard Business School partnered with Procter & Gamble to study AI’s power with 776 employees. The study (summary, full paper) found an individual with AI and a day of training outperforms a two-person team without AI by 0.14 standard deviations, delivering a higher quantity and quality of results 12-16% faster and feeling happier doing it. The results are summarized below.

Individual with AI vs	Individual without AI	Team without AI
Quality of Work	+0.37 SD	+0.14 SD
Time Spent	-16%	-12%
Positive Emotions	+43%	+19%
Negative Emotions	-23%	-9%
Technicality Gap	20% → 0%

Summary

The Cybernetic Teammate by Ethan Mollick explains the most concrete & well-supported evidence I’ve seen for the benefits of AI enabled individuals, teams, and companies (run by Harvard Business School & 776 Proctor & Gamble employees [paper link]). I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but I’ve summarized it below. The long and short is an individual with AI and a day of training outperforms an au natural two-person team by 0.14 standard deviations, delivering higher quantity & quality results 12-16% faster, and feeling happier doing it.

Overall, AI-individuals performed on par with AI-teams; however, AI-teams produced significantly more top 10% solutions, showing value in human teammates beyond what AI can provide.

The kicker: this was done last year with a GPT-4 and an older version of GPT-4o, considerably worse than today's models (GPT4.1 infused 4o, o3, Deep Research, etc.) and tools. Further, this didn’t include other job/industry/workflow-specific tools (often called “agents”) that automate busywork.

These benefits don’t come from giving AI to turn your concise, easily understood one-sentence email into an eye glazing sycophantic paragraph, but from its greatest strength: universal translation. Without AI, the scientist (R&D) delivered far more technical solutions than sales-person (Commercial), shown on the left graph. With AI, the salesperson now has their scientist and the scientist their salesperson. Developer their designer and designer their developer. Idea-guy their engineer and engineer their idea-guy. This leads the technicality of solutions to converge to a healthy medium, with more well-rounded, fleshed out ideas, and a smaller gap of understanding.

What? Increased productivity &

How?

Why? Communication

A study conducted with HBS and Proctor & Gamble showed an employee with one day of training + GPT 4o = the output of a two-person team, delivered 12-16 % faster and with a higher chance of landing a best-in-class solution—while your people feel happier doing it.

1 person with AI performs as well as 2 without

1 employee + 1 day of training ($~500) + GPT-4o ($20/month)

2 employees