Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance

To uncover how AI agents change productivity, performance, and work processes, we

introduce MindMeld: an experimentation platform enabling humans and AI agents to collaborate in integrative workspaces. In a large-scale marketing experiment on the platform, 2310

participants were randomly assigned to human-human and human-AI teams, with randomized

AI personality traits. The teams exchanged 183,691 messages, and created 63,656 image edits,

1,960,095 ad copy edits, and 10,375 AI-generated images while producing 11,138 ads for a

large think tank. Analysis of fine-grained communication, collaboration, and workflow logs

revealed that collaborating with AI agents increased communication by 137% and allowed

humans to focus 23% more on text and image content generation messaging and 20% less on

direct text editing. Humans on Human-AI teams sent 23% fewer social messages, creating 60%

greater productivity per worker and higher-quality ad copy. In contrast, human-human teams

produced higher-quality images, suggesting that AI agents require fine-tuning for multimodal

workflows. AI personality prompt randomization revealed that AI traits can complement human

personalities to enhance collaboration. For example, conscientious humans paired with open

AI agents improved image quality, while extroverted humans paired with conscientious AI

agents reduced the quality of text, images, and clicks. In field tests of ad campaigns with

~5M impressions, ads with higher image quality produced by human collaborations and higher

text quality produced by AI collaborations performed significantly better on click-through rate

and cost per click metrics. Overall, ads created by human-AI teams performed similarly to

those created by human-human teams. Together, these results suggest AI agents can improve

teamwork and productivity, especially when tuned to complement human traits.

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18238

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Ryan Watkins

Professor at George Washington University

I am a Professor with Human-Technology Collaboration and Educational Technology programs at George Washington University in Washington DC. I have written 12 books and more than 100 articles, and I co-host of the Parsing Science podcast where scientists tell the stories behind their research. I am also the developer of the WeShareScience.com online platform for sharing research videos, and SciencePods.com where researchers can create free podcasts about their science. My research interests include human interactions with intelligent machines, needs, needs assessments, and instructional design.