Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality — Dell’Acqua et al. (2026)
We introduce and study the concept of a “jagged technology frontier” to describe the uneven impact of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, where AI assistance improves performance for some tasks but worsens it for others, even within the same knowledge workflow and with a seemingly similar level of difficulty. In collaboration with the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, we have developed realistic management consulting tasks and examined the human performance implications of using AI to perform complex and knowledge-intensive work. The preregistered experiment…
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