How AI Helps Human Teams

As manufacturing R&D leaders settle into the AI age, they are increasingly working to anticipate challenges and adapt to change by building new, flexible processes and capabilities, wrote Innovation Research Interchange Executive Director Lee Green in IndustryWeek.

The research: Discussing research conducted by the IRI, the NAM’s innovation division, Green described how senior leaders have come to think about AI-enabled teams.

• Senior leaders who participated in a working group, which examined what such teams will need by the early 2030s, determined that R&D organizations will “operate as a dynamic network rather than fixed structure while combining internal expertise with external partnerships to accelerate learning and value creation,” Green said.
• Relationship building and communication will be top priorities, as humans remain “in the lead”—directing both their colleagues and AI assistants.

An experiment: The working group created three sample R&D teams, “one focusing on incremental innovation, one on adjacencies and one on transformational innovation,” each of which included an AI agent.

• On each team, the AI agent turned enormous amounts of raw data into actionable, manageable insights—the best use case for AI. This allowed humans to identify and pursue more opportunities and evaluate risks and capabilities more thoroughly.

Advice for leaders: Green offered three pieces of advice for team leaders struggling to integrate AI:

• Go back to basics: “Don’t underestimate the importance of team-building activities. Get people talking to one another and connecting,” she said.
• Reinforce the connection: “Help build business acumen by explaining and reiterating how and why each project relates back to the organization’s strategic goals.”
• Encourage working cross-functionally: “Deliberately put different teams together to work on a shared challenge and be explicit that you are doing so to get them working better together. Don’t let the teamwork get lost in the drive to solve the challenge,” she added.

The last word: As one former leader at DuPont put it, a good team is like a quilt, Green said.

• “Not every individual component is supposed to be the same. When individuals come together with the different things that they bring to the table, they create something both beautiful and functional.”