Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality

Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Edward McFowland, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz‐Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon, Karim R. Lakhani · SSRN Electronic Journal · 1 Jan 2023

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Where this sits in the debate

Will AI actually boost productivity and growth?

Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).

Key takeaway AI-written

In a field experiment with several hundred Boston Consulting Group consultants completing realistic case tasks, access to GPT-4 raised completion speed and quality substantially for tasks within the model's capability frontier, but consultants using AI on a task just outside that frontier were markedly more likely to produce wrong answers than those without it. The 'jagged frontier' finding — that AI's capability boundary is uneven and hard for users to perceive in the moment — has become a touchstone for warnings that AI productivity gains are highly task-dependent rather than universal.

About this publication

Preprint. A preprint — posted publicly before or without journal peer review; findings may still be revised.

Published: 2023 (46 months ago)
Citations: 714 (OpenAlex)

714 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2023 papers in this collection for a fair comparison.

□ added to this collection in 2026.

Edward McFowland, Ethan Mollick, Karim Lakhani, Katherine Kellogg signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions harvard university, massachusetts institute of technology, university of pennsylvania — part of why this paper is in the collection.

Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality

Key takeaway AI-written

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