Sheila Simsarian Webber, PhD, researches how artificial intelligence affects teamwork, trust, leadership, and team effectiveness. Her work examines AI as a potential teammate embedded within human teams.

What is AI as a teammate? AI can be a member of your team as a key researcher, a note taker, an idea generator, a devil’s advocate, a task organizer, and interestingly as a team meeting analyzer and coach to improve team communication, conflict, and coordination.

How is an AI teammate different from an AI tool? As a tool AI is simply working on individual tasks to reduce mundane work. As a teammate AI is tracking our meetings, analyzing our notes, giving feedback on our communication approach, nudging members who are not contributing to be a real contributor to the effectiveness of our teamwork

Can AI improve team effectiveness? As organizations capture an increasing amount of information including slack and teams messages, meeting notes, emails, etc. AI can quickly compile that information to help teams integrate material, create meeting agendas, ensure important follow-up on tasks, and improve how we work together with coaching tips

How does AI affect trust in teams? If we consider the significant amount of data being constantly captured at work and ease of using AI to analyze large quantities of data quickly and without much technical skill it’s easy to see how misuse of this information could reduce trust in teams because it can becomes a form of surveillance. We want AI to be our coach and help us to work more effectively together and we want to be careful that it doesn’t undermine trust by reducing input and different ideas.