A new study shows that artificial intelligence is boosting company performance, but not in the way most firms expect.
The study, conducted by researchers from Harvard and INSEAD, finds that the primary barrier to AI-driven growth is not access to the technology itself, but the ability to identify where it actually creates value inside a business.
Researchers studied 515 high-growth startups in a field experiment designed to test what happens when firms are given structured insight into how others deploy AI.
The intervention focused on what the authors call the “mapping problem,” defined as the challenge of discovering where and how AI can be integrated into a company’s production process.
“AI can deliver productivity gains on individual tasks, yet evidence on whether these gains aggregate to firm performance remains limited.”
Firms that received guidance on AI deployment explored a broader range of use cases across internal functions, with the largest gains concentrated in two key areas.
“We find that treated firms discover more AI use cases, a 44% increase, concentrated in product development and strategy.”
Those discoveries translated into higher outcomes across operations, customer acquisition and revenue generation.
“Treated firms complete 12% more tasks, are 18% more likely to acquire paying customers, and generate 1.9x higher revenue.”
The findings point to a single constraint shaping AI adoption: not capability, but clarity on where to apply it.
“These results provide causal evidence that AI improves firm performance and productivity even at its current capabilities, and that discovering where and how to deploy AI is a key bottleneck in realizing the gains from this technology.”
OpenAI president Greg Brockman reacts to the results of the study, saying the application of AI to business processes is now a skill in itself.
“AI use is an emerging skill which improves businesses and unlocks entrepreneurship.”
Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash
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