strategyQ5to verify
2025 large field experiment across 66 firms — individual-level AI access produces narrower effects than expected
A 2025 field experiment across 66 firms found that individual-level access to an integrated AI tool produced narrow effects — mainly less time on email and less after-hours work — rather than a broad shift in task composition. The interpretation is that individual-level AI provision, without coordinated workflow + governance changes, does not produce firm-level transformation.
Change in task composition + work hours under individual-level access to an integrated AI tool, across 66 firmsNarrow effects: less email time + less after-hours work. No broad shift in task composition from individual-level provision alone. Exact magnitudes not extracted to verification.
- Sample
- Across 66 firms; exact employee N and firm-size distribution not extracted to verification.
- Methodology
- Field experiment with individual-level access to an integrated AI tool, measuring task-composition and work-hours outcomes.
What this means
- Direct empirical evidence that AI 'access' alone is not the binding constraint — workflow + governance + coordination must shift in parallel for firm-level effects to materialize.
- Pairs with the Stanford 51-deployments finding (95% of enterprise AI failures are organizational not technical) and the McKinsey State of AI 2025 finding (88% adoption but only 6% high-performers see >5% EBIT impact) — three independent results converging on the same 'access ≠ transformation' point.
- Supports the encyclopedia's core network-mediated-adoption thesis: AI tools encountering an unchanged organizational topology produce narrow individual-level effects rather than systemic ones.
Source
(Title to verify — 66-firm 2025 field experiment on AI provision)
Field-experiment / academic paper (specific venue + URL to verify; cited in AHI institutional-economics review) · (authors to verify) · 2025 · peer-reviewed
Context
- What came before
- Optimistic case for AI productivity gains rested on individual-level controlled-task experiments + early field results (Brynjolfsson customer-support 14% gain). The 66-firm result narrows that picture for the individual-access intervention.
- What comes next
- Verify exact paper, authors, N (employees + firms), and effect-size estimates. Pair explicitly with Stanford 51-deployments + MIT NANDA GenAI Divide + McKinsey State of AI 2025 as the converging-evidence cluster on the access-vs-transformation gap.
- Where this lands
- Encyclopedia Part I §1.3 (methodology gap), Part II (workforce — what individual-level AI provision actually does), Part VII (network-mediated adoption — the explicit topology argument the encyclopedia builds toward).