Research on teams spans many contexts, but integrating knowledge from heterogeneous sources is challenging because studies typically examine different tasks that cannot be directly compared. Most investigations involve teams working on just one or a handful of tasks, and researchers lack principled ways to quantify how similar or different these tasks are from one another. We address this challenge by introducing the “Task Space,” a multidimensional space in which tasks—and the distances between them—can be represented formally, and use it to create a “Task Map” of 102 crowd-annotated tasks from the published experimental literature. We then demonstrate the Task Space’s utility by performing an integrative experiment that addresses a fundamental question in team research: when do interacting groups outperform individuals? Our experiment samples 20 diverse tasks from the Task Map at three complexity levels and recruits 1,231 participants to work either individually or in groups of three or six (180 experimental conditions). We find striking heterogeneity in group advantage, with groups performing anywhere from three times worse to 60% better than the best individual working alone, depending on the task context. Critically, the Task Space makes this heterogeneity predictable: it significantly outperforms traditional typologies in predicting group advantage on unseen tasks. Our models also reveal theoretically meaningful interactions between task features; for example, group advantage on creative tasks depends on whether the answers are objectively verifiable. We conclude by arguing that the Task Space enables researchers to integrate findings across different experiments, thereby building cumulative knowledge about team performance. This paper was accepted by Sameer Srivastava, organizations. Funding: The authors thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [Grant #202-13924] and the MIT Wade Fund for their generous support of this research. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03544 .
Redundancy Protects Human Collaborations from Failure
In the name of efficiency, organizations and governments around the world are increasingly trimming redundancy---personnel or overlapping capabilities beyond what routine operations require. Drawing on distributed computing and cognitive science, we challenge this view. Using queueing simulations and a preregistered multiplayer experiment (N = 832 in 187 teams of 3–6), we show that redundancy improves performance through two distinct routes. Adding collaborators to a team improves resilience, with larger teams completing more tasks when members became temporarily unable to contribute. Giving team members overlapping capabilities also improved efficiency, with teams in which collaborators could perform multiple roles completing substantially more work. These findings suggest that efforts to improve short-term efficiency by reducing redundancy may come at a cost, quietly eroding a team’s capacity to withstand unexpected failures.
Scaling Discovery through Test-Time Communication
Science advances not in isolation but through collaboration, yet existing agentic systems capture little of this. Whether communicating agents help remains an open question with mixed prior results. We show that test-time communication can substantially outperform independent parallel attempts on challenging tasks, where sharing a breakthrough can push the whole group forward. We first study the effect of scaling multi-agent test-time communication, where agents have no predefined roles and communicate via a shared directory, on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark requiring novel problem solving. We find that a team of $k$ communicating agents, team@$k$, matches the success rate of $4k$ independent agents, and this advantage grows with $k$, suggesting gains compound with scale. The effect is not merely efficiency: a task that no single agent can solve, a team of agents can solve reliably. Furthermore, these gains transfer to research-oriented tasks, given sufficient compute. On polyomino packing, communicating agents outperform best@$k$ and exceed the prior best-known score. On MNIST classifier compression, communication surpasses the best-known human solution. A team of four agents produced a 1,957-byte classifier submission achieving 99.4% test accuracy, smaller than both the best-known human solution and the best single-agent result. These gains are not unconditional. Independent agents may outperform communication when compute is limited or when a clear measure of progress is absent. However, under sufficient compute and clear feedback, multi-agent communication consistently yields stronger results.
Home
Research, expert perspectives, and product announcements from Atlassian on how teams can work smarter with AI. Subscribe for monthly insights on the future of teamwork.
Hierarchical Task Analysis - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at selected tasks, their use will bring unintended consequences as they alter the balance of frictions and inducements that steer the allocation of research effort across projects. Here we develop a simple mathematical model to illustrate. In fields where LLMs are useful primarily as tools for discovering promising projects, researchers will become more selective about what they publish; where they facilitate the process of publishing existing data, researchers will become less selective. By allowing scientists to work more quickly, LLMs raise the opportunity cost of researcher time, creating incentives to refine papers less thoroughly before moving on. Enticing as it is to imagine that, by saving us time on mundane tasks, LLMs will provide us with more time to think deeply and develop projects completely, our results temper such hopes.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at selected tasks, their use will bring unintended consequences as they alter the balance of frictions and inducements that steer the allocation of research effort across projects. Here we develop a simple mathematical model to illustrate. In fields where LLMs are useful primarily as tools for discovering promising projects, researchers will become more selective about what they publish; where they facilitate the process of publishing existing data, researchers will become less selective. By allowing scientists to work more quickly, LLMs raise the opportunity cost of researcher time, creating incentives to refine papers less thoroughly before moving on. Enticing as it is to imagine that, by saving us time on mundane tasks, LLMs will provide us with more time to think deeply and develop projects completely, our results temper such hopes.
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth over immediate results. In contrast, current AI systems are fundamentally short-sighted collaborators - optimized for providing instant and complete responses, without ever saying no (unless for safety reasons). What are the consequences of this dynamic? Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning. We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own. These results suggest the need for AI model development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task completion.
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth over immediate results. In contrast, current AI systems are fundamentally short-sighted collaborators - optimized for providing instant and complete responses, without ever saying no (unless for safety reasons). What are the consequences of this dynamic? Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning. We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own. These results suggest the need for AI model development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task completion.
Human learning is an understudied but promising lever for boosting human–AI synergy
Humans collaborating with AI hold the promise of achieving superior outcomes compared to either acting alone (i.e., human–AI synergy). However, the conditions that facilitate such synergy when humans are advised by AI are not well understood. A recent meta-analysis showed that, on average, human–AI combinations do not outperform the better individual agent. We argue that this pessimistic conclusion arises from insufficient attention to human learning in experimental designs. To substantiate this claim, we reanalyzed all 74 studies included in the original meta-analysis and found that most previous research overlooked design features that foster human learning (e.g., outcome feedback to participants). Our reanalysis further revealed that studies providing outcome feedback show tentatively higher synergy than those without outcome feedback. Crucially, feedback paired with AI explanations was associated with positive synergy, while explanations without feedback were associated with negative synergy—suggesting that explanations improve synergy mainly when humans can learn to verify the AI’s reliability through feedback. Our reanalysis suggests that the current literature underestimates the potential of human–AI collaboration because it predominantly relies on paradigms that do not facilitate human learning, thus hindering humans from effectively adapting their collaboration strategies. However, experiments directly varying learning opportunities are needed for stronger, causal conclusions. We advocate for a paradigm shift in human–AI interaction research that explicitly addresses human learning and thus enhances our understanding of and support for successful human–AI collaboration.
Home - Inside Atlassian
Research, expert perspectives, and product announcements from Atlassian on how teams can work smarter with AI. Subscribe for monthly insights on the future of teamwork.
Home - Inside Atlassian
Research, expert perspectives, and product announcements from Atlassian on how teams can work smarter with AI. Subscribe for monthly insights on the future of teamwork.
AutoScientists: Self-Organizing Agent Teams for Long-Running Scientific Experimentation
Scientific research proceeds through iterative cycles of hypothesis generation, experiment design, execution, and revision. AI agents can automate parts of this process, but existing approaches typically follow a single research trajectory or coordinate through a central planner with fixed objectives. As a result, they struggle to sustain parallel exploration, adapt as experimental evidence changes, or preserve knowledge of failed directions over long-running experiments. We introduce AutoScientists, a decentralized team of AI agents for long-running computational scientific experimentation. Agents interpret a shared experimental state, self-organize into teams around promising hypotheses, critique proposals before using experimental compute, and share successes and failures to reduce redundant exploration. Under matched experimental budgets, AutoScientists improves over prior AI agents across biomedical machine learning, language-model training optimization, and protein fitness prediction. On BioML-Bench, spanning biomedical imaging, protein engineering, single-cell omics, and drug discovery, AutoScientists achieves a mean leaderboard percentile of 74.4% across 24 tasks, improving over the strongest AI agent by +8.33%. On GPT training optimization, AutoScientists reaches a target validation bits-per-byte 1.9x faster than Autoresearch and continues discovering improvements from a starting champion where the single-agent approach finds none (7 vs. 0 accepted improvements). On ProteinGym fitness prediction, AutoScientists discovers a method for ACE2-Spike binding that improves over the current state-of-the-art model by +12.5% in Spearman correlation. Applied without modification across all 217 ProteinGym assays, the same method improves over the prior state of the art by +6.5% (Spearman correlation).
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (Published 2016)
New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
Algorithmic Collective Action in Machine Learning
We initiate a principled study of algorithmic collective action on digital platforms that deploy machine learning algorithms. We propose a simple theoretical model of a collective interacting with a firm's learning algorithm. The collective pools the data of participating individuals and executes an algorithmic strategy by instructing participants how to modify their own data to achieve a collective goal. We investigate the consequences of this model in three fundamental learning-theoretic settings: the case of a nonparametric optimal learning algorithm, a parametric risk minimizer, and gradient-based optimization. In each setting, we come up with coordinated algorithmic strategies and characterize natural success criteria as a function of the collective's size. Complementing our theory, we conduct systematic experiments on a skill classification task involving tens of thousands of resumes from a gig platform for freelancers. Through more than two thousand model training runs of a BERT-like language model, we see a striking correspondence emerge between our empirical observations and the predictions made by our theory. Taken together, our theory and experiments broadly support the conclusion that algorithmic collectives of exceedingly small fractional size can exert significant control over a platform's learning algorithm.
Habits of High-Functioning Teams
I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these ideas and follow someone else’s model if you’ve never seen what good looks like.
Agency plus automation: Designing artificial intelligence into interactive systems
Much contemporary rhetoric regards the prospects and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence techniques to automate an increasing range of tasks, especially those once considered the purview of people alone. These accounts are often wildly optimistic, understating outstanding challenges while turning a blind eye to the human labor that undergirds and sustains ostensibly “automated” services. This long-standing focus on purely automated methods unnecessarily cedes a promising design space: one in which computational assistance augments and enriches, rather than replaces, people’s intellectual work. This tension between human agency and machine automation poses vital challenges for design and engineering. In this work, we consider the design of systems that enable rich, adaptive interaction between people and algorithms. We seek to balance the often-complementary strengths and weaknesses of each, while promoting human control and skillful action. We share case studies of interactive systems we have developed in three arenas—data wrangling, exploratory analysis, and natural language translation—that integrate proactive computational support into interactive systems. To improve outcomes and support learning by both people and machines, we describe the use of shared representations of tasks augmented with predictive models of human capabilities and actions. We conclude with a discussion of future prospects and scientific frontiers for intelligence augmentation research.
