The effectiveness of teamwork in professional and academic environments typically depends on various factors, including communication and coordinated attention. In this context, collective attention entails the ability of team members to cooperatively focus on the task at hand, optimally dividing it into subtasks and alternating their efforts to complete it as efficiently as possible.

Researchers at Northeastern University recently carried out a study exploring whether the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI)-based virtual assistants within a team of humans influences the team's collective attention. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, suggest that the use of AI-based tools in a collaborating group can significantly influence what is discussed by team-members and how it is discussed.

"AI is going to play an increasingly large role in how we are going to work in the future," Christoph Riedl, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. "Research has been investigating dyads of one human working with one AI system for a while. Yet less research has looked at how entire teams will work with an AI system."

The key objective of the recent study by Riedl and his colleagues was to gain a better understanding of how the presence of AI assistance would impact teamwork. Instead of focusing only on the dynamics between the AI and individual humans, however, they looked at the AI's influence on dynamics between all members of the team, including human-human dynamics.

"We ran a lab experiment in which groups of 3–4 humans had to solve a difficult puzzle task," Riedl said. "To help them, they got access to an AI assistant. Over the course of the experiment, the AI assistant gave the team several clues on how to solve the puzzle. We recorded the communication of the team and looked for changes in the team's communication pattern right before the AI assistant dispensed the clue and right after."

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