Navigating the Impact of AI Technologies on Collaboration and Understanding Among Workers

Within your business environment, the dynamics among teams in your organization continually involve team members learning, adapting, and collaborating seamlessly to achieve success. Notably, teams that work closely together can develop an intuitive understanding of each other, enabling them to anticipate each other's thoughts and actions in response to various situations. In the realm of research, this intuitive understanding is known as "team cognition," and it has proven to be a significant driver of team performance. Teams are actively trained to cultivate team cognition, aiming to streamline teamwork, enhance efficiency, and optimize operational outcomes.

However, the introduction of AI technologies presents a potential challenge to the development of this team cognition, which could inadvertently impact performance. An article authored by Dr. Nathan McNeese and Dr. Chris Flathmann, titled "Let's think together! Assessing shared mental models, performance, and trust in human-agent teams," sheds light on how the presence of AI technologies might hinder human teammates from aligning effectively and performing at their best.

The research findings emphasize that humans tend to establish a weaker level of team cognition when working with AI systems compared to only working in an environment with humans. Furthermore, the presence of an AI system tends to disrupt the consistency of team cognition among human team members. Consequently, the authors highlight the potential for AI technology to disrupt a crucial element of team effectiveness. This disruption is attributed to a perceived lack of reciprocity, stemming from the fact that AI's artificial nature creates the impression that it comprehends humans less genuinely.

These diminished levels of team cognition resulted in reduced trust and performance within these teams. This underscores the critical importance of nurturing shared understanding, even when integrating AI technologies into human workflows. However, there is a positive aspect pertaining to AI's impact on team cognition highlighted in the article: two key factors can mitigate these challenges—time and communication. Over time, humans can develop a deeper shared understanding with AI systems, and effective communication significantly accelerates the pace of this understanding's growth, resulting in team cognition forming. Consequently, the article suggests that future implementations of AI should prioritize enhancing communication between humans and AI technologies to ensure that any disruptions in team cognition are only temporary.

For your organization, these findings yield several key insights. First and foremost, your organization must facilitate interactions and rapport-building between human workers and AI technologies. This interaction will lead to a better grasp of the technologies and a more profound understanding of their fellow human teammates. Moreover, it is essential to continually monitor the outcomes stemming from team cognition—especially performance and trust—within these teams. This monitoring provides a predictive lens into the evolving understanding that humans are developing for their AI counterparts. As history has demonstrated, organizations that foster higher levels of team cognition can become performance juggernauts, and the results of this work show that this trend will likely persist after the introduction of AI technologies; however, new considerations and challenges are posed by this integration.

If you’re interested in learning more about AI and collective intelligence, or you want to discuss how AI can best be used in your organization, feel free to reach out and contact us.