Organising human-AI creative work: evidence from a field experiment

Join our Organisational Behaviour seminar

Speaker: Professor Nan Jia from USC Marshall School of Business

About the seminar topic

Organisations increasingly rely on creative content such as images and videos to communicate with customers and shape brand identity. Advances in generative artificial intelligence now make it possible to incorporate AI into creative content production, raising an organisational question about how creative tasks should be allocated between humans and AI systems. Creative production involves 2 activities: interpretive tasks that define the message and brand representation, and execution tasks that translate these ideas into finished artifacts. Because humans possess stronger contextual judgment while AI excels at rapidly generating and recombining design elements, performance should be highest when humans perform interpretive tasks and AI assists with execution. We test this framework using a field experiment with a design-manufacturing firm producing lighting products. Over 4-and-a-half months, we randomly varied how humans and AI collaborated in producing images and short advertising videos for social media. Across more than 350 posts, we observe both external outcomes, such as audience visibility and engagement, and internal production measures including iteration cycles and production time. Posts produced through human-led interpretive tasks combined with AI-assisted execution achieve greater visibility than posts produced entirely by humans or entirely by AI. Incorporating AI increases iteration cycles but reduces overall production time, indicating that AI-assisted production can lower the time required to produce content. These findings suggest that the value of generative AI lies not in replacing human creators but in reconfiguring the division of labour in creative production.

Speaker bio

Nan Jia is Professor of Strategic Management at the USC Marshall School of Business, where she is also incoming Chair of the Management and Organization department. Her research examines how firms navigate the intersection of business, government, and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on corporate political strategy, business–government relationships, and the organisational and strategic implications of artificial intelligence. Her work has been published in Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science, among others. She previously served as Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal and is currently Guest Editor of the SMJ special issue on Strategy and AI. She holds elected leadership roles in the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management.

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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.