Procter & Gamble ran a real test on this, not a survey or a vibes estimate. They took 776 of their own employees, put them on actual product innovation problems, and randomly assigned them to work alone, in pairs, with AI, or without it. The results came out in a Harvard-led study published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, and they're worth paying attention to.
The headline finding: a single person working with AI produced solutions roughly as good as a two-person team working without it. Teams without AI beat solo workers without AI by 0.24 standard deviations. Solo workers with AI came in at 0.37. Teams with AI landed at 0.39. Statistically, the gap between a person plus AI and a full team plus AI was barely there.
In plain terms, the second human in the room stopped being the thing that made the work better. The AI did that instead.
A few things worth noting about the setup:
- The participants weren't interns. Most had been at P&G for more than 10 years.
- The work was real. Product ideas, packaging, retail strategy for active business units like baby care and feminine care.
- Speed mattered too. AI-enabled groups finished 12-16% faster and produced longer, more detailed solutions.
Victor Aguilar, P&G's Chief R&D and Innovation Officer, said the study confirmed what the company had been suspecting internally: AI is a real boost to innovation, whether people are working alone or together.
Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who wrote about the study, framed the bigger point well. "AI doesn't just automate existing tasks, it changes how we can think about work itself," he wrote. There was one place though where the human teams still had a real edge. Teams with AI were significantly more likely to produce a top-10% breakthrough idea. So AI raises the floor for everyone, but real teams still raise the ceiling.
That distinction matters because the easy read on a study like this is that companies should start cutting team sizes in half. The harder read is that the role of a team is changing. If a solo person plus AI can hit the average output of a pair, then the reason to have multiple people in the room is no longer redundancy or extra horsepower. It's for the kind of thinking that gets you somewhere nobody expected.
This is also landing at a moment when executives are already moving. A recent NBER survey of nearly 750 corporate executives found firms expect AI to lift labor productivity by about 3% in 2026, with large companies planning to shed headcount and smaller ones planning to grow it. The org chart is being quietly redrawn while everyone is busy arguing about chatbots.
The interesting question isn't whether AI replaces teams. It's what teams are even for once one person can do what two used to. The instinct in most companies is going to be to shrink the team and pocket the savings, but the study quietly suggests that's the worse play. The groups that kept AI in the room produced the breakthrough work. The ones that treated AI as a way to need fewer people just got the average answer, faster. Whichever read companies land on over the next year will end up saying more about them than it does about the technology.
