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A new study from The McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and accounting firm KPMG takes a look at why some people get much more value out of using AI than others.
The researchers analyzed how people actually use AI in practice and found that high impact users in the study produced better and more efficient work by using AI as a collaborator rather than a search engine.
Researcher Zach Kowaleski is assistant professor in the Shulkin Department of Accounting at The University of Texas at Austin.
“You want to be very clear about what you're asking for and what it's going to look like when you get it,” he said.
“And people who are doing that in their workflow are also often the ones who are iterating on it, which means that when they hear something back, like any good listener, they kind of push on the things that don't sound right to them and make improvements from there.”
The study found that so-called high impact users provided clearer context and specific goals to achieve results. The biggest gains from AI were found in those who used AI in their daily work flows and not just occasionally.
The most sophisticated users treated AI as a reasoning partner, approaching problems by asking the LLM to assume a specific role or perspective and provided concrete direction and examples. They showed AI how to reason through tasks and required the model to explain how it got a response. Instead of accepting the first outputs, the refined the model’s work over multiple exchanges.
The researchers spent eight months studying 1.4 million real workplace interactions with artificial intelligence.
The study is published in Harvard Business Review
