Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality

The authors thank Corey Gelb-Bicknell and Annika Hildebrandt for insightful input and excellent research assistance. They thank Saud Almutairi, Michael Bervell, John Cheng, Pallavi Deshpande, Patrick Healy, Maxim Ledovskiy, John Kalil, Yogesh Kumaar, Kelly Kung, Rick Lacerda, Paula Marin Sariego, Quoc-Anh Nguyen, Rafael Noriega, Alejandro Ortega, Rahul Phanse, Nitya Rajgopal, Ogbemi Rewane, Anahita Sahu, Kyle Schirmann, Andrew Seo, Tanay Tiwari, Elliot Tobin, and Aaron Zheng for helpful research assistance. They also thank Kevin Dai for outstanding support with data and visualizations. Additionally, the authors thank MarcAntonio Awada, Charles Ayoubi, Maxime Courtaux, Clement Dumas, Dietmar Harhoff, Gaurav Jha, Jackie Lane, Jessie Li, Max Männig, Michael Menietti, Rachel Mural, Steven Randazzo, Zahra Rasouli, Esther Yoon, Leonid Zhukov, and David Zuluaga Martínez for helpful feedback. Seminar participants at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Toronto, INSEAD, Bocconi, Chicago Booth, Georgia Tech, Wharton, New York University, University of Southern California, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Strategy Science, and the Academy of Management provided helpful feedback. The authors are grateful for the guidance of Lamar Pierce and two referees at Organization Science in helping to improve this paper. K. R. Lakhani thanks Martha Wells, Anne Leckie, Iain Banks, and Alastair Reynolds for inspiring artificial intelligence futures. The authors used Poe, Claude, Manus, and ChatGPT for light copyediting and graphic creations. All errors are the authors’ own. The first working paper of this study was released on September 18, 2023.