Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition: A new study suggests AI can be a team player…OpenAI promotes its COO while CEO Sam Altman shifts focus…Apple shakes up its AI team amid frustration over delayed Apple Intelligence features…a revolutionary new AI weather forecasting method…and AI transforms architecture.
Evidence of AI’s positive impact on productivity continues to mount. But while many executives view AI as ultimately a substitute for human labor, hoping it will eventually fully automate tasks and save on headcount, the data suggests that this is not the best way to think about the technology. Yes, in a few cases, AI can fully automate some tasks. But in most cases, today’s AI systems—including the so-called “AI agents” from the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Google—aren’t yet capable or reliable enough to do this. Instead, AI systems should be thought of as a complement to human labor—a way to lift the performance of people, not to replace them.
The latest support for this view comes from a fascinating study by a group of researchers—from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, ESSEC Business School in France, and consumer products giant Procter & Gamble—and published as a working paper on the research repository SSRN. (The authors include Wharton’s Ethan Mollick, who has attracted a huge social media following for his tips on how to use AI effectively in business.)
In 2024, the researchers conducted a one-day virtual product development workshop at P&G, with the process designed to mirror the one that consumer products behemoth famously uses—except this time with an AI twist. In particular, this workshop involved the “seed” stage of product development—which is about brainstorming lots of possible new product ideas and incubating them to the point where a decision can be made on whether to test them at a larger scale. P&G normally assigns two-person teams consisting of one Commercial operations person and one R&D expert to work together on brainstorming ideas. In this case, the researchers took 776 P&G employees from Commercial and R&D and randomly assigned them to do one of the following: work alone; work alone but with access to a generative AI assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model; work in the usual two-person brainstorming team consisting of one Commercial and one R&D person; or work in the usual two-person configuration but with access to the AI assistant.
The groups were then tasked with coming up with new ideas for consumer products in the various P&G divisions in which they worked (baby care, feminine care, grooming, and oral care). These ideas were then assessed by human judges with both relevant business and technology expertise.
AI lifts individual performance—by a lot
Two heads are generally better than one, so it is perhaps not surprising that individuals working alone and without access to AI did the worst. But it turned out that individuals assisted by AI performed, on average, better than two-person teams without AI. In fact, the performance of these AI-assisted individuals was not statistically better than two-person teams working with AI. This might lead one to conclude that AI can indeed be a good substitute for human labor—enabling a company like Procter & Gamble to reduce its two-person product teams to just single individuals brainstorming with the help of AI.
There were some other big benefits to the individuals working with AI, too. Individuals working with AI were able to work faster—taking more than 16% less time to come up with an idea compared to people working without AI, while teams working with AI were about 12% faster.
Working with AI was also better than “bowling alone”—individuals reported more positive emotions and fewer negative ones during the product ideation process than the unassisted lone wolves.
Importantly, people working alone tended to come up with ideas that fit primarily into their professional silos—commercial people favoring product innovations that were mostly about novel commercial ideas (changes in branding, packaging, or marketing strategy) while the R&D specialists favored technological innovations. But when assisted by AI, these individuals achieved blended approaches, combining both technical innovation and commercial innovation—just like the human-human pairings did. “This suggests AI serves not just as an information provider but as an effective boundary-spanning mechanism, helping professionals reason across traditional domain boundaries and approach problems more holistically,” the researchers wrote.
Helping teams to be extraordinary
But, before you jump to the conclusion that AI should be used to reduce team sizes, it is important to point out perhaps the most interesting finding of the whole study: The two person teams working with AI produced far more ideas that the human experts rated as “exceptional”—the 10% that they judged most likely to lead to truly breakout products. And the human teams assisted by AI also reported the most enjoyment from working on the task, compared to the other groups.
Blogging about the findings, Mollick wrote that “organizations have primarily viewed AI as just another productivity tool, like a better calculator or spreadsheet,” but that employees were often using “AI for critical thinking and complex problem solving, not just routine productivity tasks.” AI could be seen as another member of the team—as a collaborator—not just another tool, he wrote. “Companies that focus solely on efficiency gains from AI will not only find workers unwilling to share their AI discoveries for fear of making themselves redundant but will also miss the opportunity to think bigger about the future of work,” he wrote. He encouraged organizations to reimagine work and management structures, not just seek to automate existing processes.
I am sure this is correct. Unfortunately, the temptation for many managers will be to grab at the obvious labor and time savings AI offers, since there is an obvious and immediate pay-off in labor savings. It will take braver executives to argue for keeping people in place but using AI to empower them to be exceptional.
With that, here’s the rest of this week’s AI news.
Before we get to the news, if you’re interested in learning more about how AI will impact your business, the economy, and our societies (and given that you’re reading this newsletter, you probably are), please consider joining me at the Fortune Brainstorm AI London 2025 conference. The conference is being held May 6-7 at the Rosewood Hotel in London. Confirmed speakers include Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert, eBay chief AI officer Nitzan Mekel, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, noted tech analyst Benedict Evans, and many more. I’ll be there, of course. I hope to see you there too. You can apply to attend here.
And if I miss you in London, why not consider joining me in Singapore on July 22 and 23 for Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore. You can learn more about that event here.
Pop star Chappell Roan is no stranger to controversy: She’s gotten pushback for complaining about “abuse and harassment” by strangers in public, canceling a performance at the last minute to prioritize her health, and refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in the last election.
And now, with comments she made last week as a guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Roan has really stepped into a hornet’s nest: She’s angered moms.
When asked by host Alex Cooper if she’s still close with friends back home in Missouri, she said that she is, but that their lives are very different, with many of them parents to little children.
“All of my friends who have kids are in hell,” the 27-year-old said. “I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age. I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”
As the oldest of four kids herself, Roan added that her mom had her at 23, asking, “Why did my parents do that?”
The interview quickly moved on—to high school reminiscing, early idols, fame. But many moms have remained stuck on the parenting comments, taking to social media to call Roan out.
“What she said was deeply misogynistic,” noted one critic on Instagram. “Pushing the narrative against mothers. It’s so miserable, it’s so awful blah blah blah.”
Parenting, said another on Instagram, is “hard af don’t get me wrong but to openly sh*t on your friends? After they vented to her in confidence and probably already feel like crap. She’s not doing them any favors, I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who needs to air out other people’s dirty laundry for the sake of fame. “
Some agreed with that criticism over on X, with one noting that the comments are “a prime example of why you cannot just vent to anyone because I guarantee she has this perspective because a few of her mom friends are going through it,” adding, “May the friendships of narcissistic childless women with no sense of loyalty [never] find me lol.”
Another person on X admitted that, though she loves the pop star, her comment “reinforces the stigma that if you complain about motherhood you must hate your life and your kids. :/ motherhood is hard, not miserable and we don’t hate our kids.”
On the Mom Wars Substack, author Kara Kennedy went so far as to suggest Roan is mom-bashing to further her career, as “hating kids right now is in vogue.”
Still others defended Roan, criticizing those who took offense.
“If you’re a mom and she offended you by sharing her personal opinion from her life (not yours), ask yourself why,” noted an Instagram commenter. “You’re projecting your unhappiness on her. You heard what you wanted to hear, not what she said.”
Added another, “Kids aren’t for everyone. I respect her answer and found it to be honest; not negative.”
Why were Chappel Roan’s comments so triggering?
Laura Markham, a Brooklyn-based clinical psychologist, mother, and parenting coach, understands why the pop star’s comments were a “profound emotional trigger.”
“Parents are doing one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, with very little societal support,” she tells Fortune. “They are often exhausted and sleep-deprived. They feel constant pressure to be ‘perfect’ from social media. Deep down, they desperately need affirmation that their sacrifice matters.”
Moms feeling defensive about what Roan said, Markham explains, is “not insecurity so much as a fear that if they acknowledge the profound challenges too openly, the difficult feelings might overwhelm them.” Our culture, she points out, “offers parents almost no structural support while simultaneously romanticizing parenthood. This creates a perfect storm where parents must convince themselves and others that the struggles are ‘worth it’ because the alternative—admitting how much they need help—feels too vulnerable in a society that judges parental struggle as personal failure.”
TikToker and mom Stella Joy, in a video now seen over 1.2 million times, touched on some similar ideas, and says she believes people got so defensive because “they don’t like having a mirror held up to the fact that they fell for the greatest lie ever told,” which is, from the moment they hold their first baby doll as a kid, that “being a mother is our ultimate goal.”
Markham, meawhile, points to evidence that confirms what Roan observed about unhappiness and parenting: One study, for example, found a decline in well-being once parenting begins. Another found that couples without children were happier in their relationships.
But the big response to Roan’s comments is also evidence of an American political clash, Markham says.
“There is also a significant political backlash right now that glorifies motherhood as women’s ultimate fulfillment, precisely as reproductive rights are being curtailed nationwide,” she says. “For this ideology to succeed, motherhood must be portrayed as universally blissful despite mounting evidence of parental struggle in a society without adequate support systems … When young women like Roan speak openly about the struggles their parent-friends face, it directly challenges a narrative that aims to channel women back toward traditional roles without acknowledging the profound difficulties involved.”
Instead of responding with compassion and acknowledging these systemic issues, she says, “we’re shaming women who speak truthfully about their experiences,” which only further deepens parents’ isolation and “manipulates parents’ genuine love for their children into a weapon against honest conversation.”
Some are really trying to be honest, though—especially on TikTok, where many of the responses to Roan addressed these complexities.
“I struggle with happiness on a daily basis,” said Mallory Brooks, a 26-year-old single mom who defended Roan’s honesty in a video (above) viewed over 900,000 times. “I love my child more than anything in the world,” she said. But on top of the day-to-day difficulties, she added, “a lot of moms are promised happiness as the result of motherhood.” Now she realizes, “I was promised a village that I don’t have.”
The FAA has changed rules that allow the tracking of private jets. The agency also says it’s considering making ownership information private by default at some point in the future. Elon Musk and Taylor Swift have called trackers that use the formerly publicly available data a threat.
The days of being able to monitor where private planes owned by celebrities are coming to an end.
A new rule change at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will make it easier for owners of those jets to hide their registration information, making it more challenging for tracking sites like the ones created by a college student who caught the wrath of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
Private aircraft owners can now submit an electronic request that the FAA withhold their aircraft registration information from public view, meaning it will not be publicly accessible through FAA services. The agency also said it’s evaluating whether to make that information private by default.
This almost certainly puts the final nail in the coffin of popular flight-tracking services like those created by Jack Sweeney. A little more than two years ago, Musk threatened legal action against the founder of the jet-tracking app and permanently suspended the @ElonJet account on Twitter (now X), which tracked the flights of Musk’s private jet, as well as Sweeney’s personal account.
Months later, Taylor Swift’s lawyers filed a cease-and-desist letter to Sweeney, attempting to ban another tracker he created that followed the movements of the pop star, saying, “While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our client.”
The rule changes followed the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. That Biden-era legislation gave the FAA two years to develop rules that would let private-jet owners keep their personal information hidden.
Entertainment8 years ago