How to Stand out in AI Era
Aug 07-2024
To obtain profound understanding of AI’s actual effect on organizations, Zhu Li, NSD Associate Research Fellow, and her team conducted online survey with open-ended questionnaires that focus on the concrete influence of generative AI technology on individual employees. She shared her findings at the 186th Langrun Policy Talk, an event of the NSD that aims to provide research-based policy advice.
Using difference-in-difference method, the research analyzed the network differences between AI-using employees and non-AI-using employees before and after AI technology was adopted in the second quarter of 2023. Initially (first quarter of 2023 and before), the two groups showed no conspicuous divergence in two metrics: centrality, which denotes an employee’s standing in a company; and structural hole, which measures an employee’s power within an organizational network. However, the release and adoption of generative AI saw its users gaining advantage in network position.
Zhu Li and her team then looked into the source of such a rise in reputation and power. They discovered that AI-using employees significantly increased the frequency of interaction with their direct reports and managers high up in corporate hierarchy. At the same time, they were capable of establishing more frequent and smoother connections in cross-departmental work.
The research concluded that high human-capital employees showed more preference for using AI; staff in creative work tend to rely more on AI; and AI’s application not only helped some employees to improve their reputation and power, but also significantly boosted the horizontal and vertical coordination and interaction in an organization. Zhu Li said that further research would be conducted by parsing the statistics on specific AI applications used by employees as well as interaction turns.
