From our days of naps in preschool to our post-grad march into corporate America, we’ve been told the path to collecting all the coins, unlocking achievement badges, and defeating the final boss of capitalism is to be a “good team player.”

But what if the teammate who finally understands you… isn’t human?

What if, instead of Skynet sending a T-800 to eliminate humanity, it just dispatches an AI assistant to help you finish that pivot table in Excel?

Lucky for us, some of the most fascinating insights about AI aren’t in the breathless posts about new models—benchmarks they may or may not have been trained on, depending on who you ask—but in recent releases of actual deep and detailed academic research about how AI is changing the way we work right now. They’ve discovered something weird: AI might actually be really good at teamwork.

In a recent study, Harvard's David Deming and others had participants lead teams—some made up of humans, others of AI agents—through complex problem-solving tasks. The result? Good leaders performed just as well with AI teammates as they did with people.

Turns out, the same skills that make someone a strong human leader—asking thoughtful questions, guiding a conversation, surfacing useful info—work just as well when you’re leading a squad of LLMs. Leadership is more about how we collaborate than who we’re collaborating with.

Meanwhile, over at P&G, researchers ran a large-scale field experiment with hundreds tasked with solving real product development challenges. Some worked alone, some in pairs, some with AI copilots. The results showed that individuals with AI matched the performance of full human teams. And, AI helped break down silos: engineers proposed commercially viable ideas, marketers came up with technically sound ones. The AI helped reshape how expertise flows through an organization.

But maybe the most fascinating finding: those in the study working with AI reported feeling more positive, more supported, and less anxious than those working solo. In our competitive work culture that treats burnout as a badge of honor and dissatisfaction as a personal failing, AI somehow created a workspace where people felt more energized and less like throwing their laptop through a window by Thursday evening.

According to Erik Brynjolfsson and Stanford's newly released 2025 AI Index Report, AI is rapidly becoming embedded in our everyday lives and workplaces. Business adoption has accelerated dramatically, with 78% of organizations reporting using AI in 2024, up from 55% the previous year. The report notes examples of AI improving productivity and, in most cases, helping to narrow skill gaps across the workforce. Meanwhile, AI systems have made major performance leaps on technical benchmarks, while becoming more efficient and affordable – the inference cost for a system performing at GPT-3.5 level has dropped over 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024. That's like going from 'luxury yacht' to 'public transit during non-peak hours.' AI already costs less than the power for those lights shining on your company's hallway of motivational posters.

What are these academic studies really telling us?

Maybe AI isn’t here to steal our jobs—maybe it’s just here to take the busywork off our plates. If we build it right, it’s not with a threat of “I’ll be back”, but with a more subtle “How can I help?”

There's a meme about AI that goes "I want an AI to fold my laundry not take over my creative tasks." And, yeah, I totally agree – while we don't yet have robots that can distinguish between my favorite t-shirt of my cat and that free v-neck I got in 2021, I can ask Claude to read and fix an old README or lint my code until it gets a perfect score. If that's not the dev's version of doing laundry, then I don't know what is.

I don't think AI is replacing human connection. I'm confident it's not replacing creativity, although work culture and productivity porn has weirdly internalized the contradictory message that both are disposable in our quest for wealth and happiness. These studies suggest AI can augment our humanity, in ways that feel... strangely human. Or maybe at least less dehumanizing than the worst elements of modern work culture, that takes real humans and makes them feel like soulless machines. Maybe GPT did just mean General Purpose Technology, all along.

And, hey, bonus: that new AI teammate doesn’t need a parking spot, doesn’t interrupt you mid-sentence, and doesn’t send passive-aggressive emails off an auto-timer on Friday evenings. Heck, it doesn't even need sentience. And if I'm honest? I'm not entirely sure all of my human colleagues throughout my career passed that particular Turing test anyway.

I don’t believe the future of work is about humans versus machines. But I do believe that the present—the how of building AI teammates instead of Terminators—is about creating better ways to think and work together.

I, for one, welcome our AI teammates. And unlike the Terminator, they’re much better at small talk.