On April 15, 2024, Stanford Digital Fellow Matt Beane shared current research, “How Developing AI-Enabled Robots and Nonprofessional Ability Went Hand in Hand at JointBot.”
Professionals routinely rely on nonprofessionals, and research depicts this relationship as either irrelevant or detrimental to nonprofessionals’ skill development. This dynamic is particularly problematic given an increasingly polarized skill landscape and can be intensified by artificial intelligence use. Yet prior work in technology and organizing suggests this is not necessary: when professionals share control, organizations can develop capabilities, improve outcomes, and build nonprofessional skill at the same time. To explore this possibility, we examine JointBot, a vendor in our three-year, US-wide, multi-sited field study of AI-enabled robotics in warehousing. The firm had chosen a technological design that required direct robot control, so hired nonprofessionals for this task. Professionals valued their insight into system performance, so included them in complex technical problem-solving, which enriched nonprofessionals’ skills and careers. This was possible because professionals shared the control task and workers had slack time. Workers expanded skill accelerated design iteration and improved early system performance, though these effects were strongest when system reliability was low. Beyond explaining how nonprofessionals might build skill through work with professionals, this study contributes to our understanding of problem-solving in learning as well as the ways that humans can complement automation in the workplace.
Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use across the broader world of work. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the TED stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup. In 2012 he was selected as a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer, and in 2021 was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list. Beane is an assistant professor in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Digital Fellow with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. When he’s not studying intelligent technologies and learning, he enjoys playing guitar; his morning coffee ritual with his wife, Kristen; and reading science fiction—a lot of science fiction. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
