Raffaella Sadun's first doctoral dissertation paper examined why computer-related capital helped some firms far more than others.
“my first paper of my doctoral dissertation was all about this.”
Person
Raffaella Sadun
1 episodes · 17 quoted claims
Sadun says computers and software in the 1990s changed the task content of jobs, replacing some tasks and complementing others.
“With the introduction of computers and software in the nineties, these technologies were changing the task content of jobs”
Sadun found that information technology helped some firms more than others depending on their ability to reallocate tasks, hire different workers, or reorganize work.
“it all came down to their ability to adopt this technology, which in turn came down to their ability to reallocate tasks or hire different types of workers, or change the ways in which work was organized.”
Sadun says data link the emergence of superstar firms and widening disparities in outcomes across firms to differences in the ability to implement new technology.
“there is data out there that traces back the emergence of superstar firms and this disparity in outcomes across firms at the macro level.”
Sadun speculates, based on very preliminary evidence, that new organizations may use AI better than older firms that must retrofit their operations.
“a new organization that is born today would be better equipped at using this technology and getting exponential returns from these technologies than organizations that have to retrofit what they do to adopt the technology.”
Sadun says tight labor markets after the COVID-19 pandemic led companies to rethink reskilling.
“after COVID, tightening labor markets really scared companies, so they started thinking about reskilling in a different way.”
Harvard Business School's Digital Reskilling Lab is working with fifteen companies in Europe, Latin America and the US.
“it's called the Digital Reskilling Lab, and we're working with fifteen companies now, some of them quite large, some in Europe, some in Latin America, some in the US”
A recent National Academies report speculated about the impact of AI on the labor force, according to Sadun.
“There was a recent report from the National Academies, and they were speculating on what's the impact of AI on the labor force.”
The National Academies report speculated that AI would have limited effects on the least expert workers because they lack the context to use it productively, a pattern shaped like an inverted U.
“The report was speculating that AI would probably have very limited effects on the super naive and less expert workers because they don't have the contextual knowledge to really use these technologies in the most productive way.”
In Sadun's ongoing study of AI for blue-collar workers solving machinery problems, job satisfaction was increasing at the halfway point.
“We are halfway through the study, and it seems like job satisfaction is increasing.”
Sadun's experiment on AI and teams was run with a consumer packaging company and involved research and development and marketing staff.
“In particular, in this experiment, we have R and D and marketing. So we worked with one company. This is a consumer packaging company.”
The experiment compared individuals alone, individuals with an AI persona acting as their counterpart function, teams without AI, and teams with AI.
“One is individuals working on their own, the second is an individual working with AI, and the role of AI is to be a persona.”
The researchers ran the experiment as a hackathon designed to mimic the company's normal innovation process.
“In the context of a hackathon, we tried to mimic as much as possible what the company does normally.”
In the experiment, individuals working with AI produced ideas whose average quality matched that of teams and teams with AI.
“The quality of their output is on average as good as the quality that comes out of teams and teams with AI.”
Without AI, participants' ideas reflected their own function, with R&D people proposing technical ideas and marketing people proposing commercial ones.
“when people work by themselves without AI, their ideas pretty much mimic their functional expertise. If you're an R and D person, you're going to propose a very technical proposal.”
Teams with AI were disproportionately likely to place ideas in the top decile of submissions in Sadun's experiment.
“we find that teams with AI are disproportionately better at placing these ideas on the top decile of the submission.”
Participants using AI, alone or in teams, produced better solutions on average in a fraction of the time.
“The individuals plus AI were, and also the teams with AI were able to, on average, come up with better solutions, but also at a fraction of the time.”