Does better work always mean better workers? - Google Research

Judgment is what sets senior professionals apart from their junior peers. Building judgment requires thousands of hours learning on the job, usually through tedious but formative engagement with relatively routine work, often under guided supervision by experienced workers. But AI is already changing how on-the-job learning works. On the one hand, empirical studies in radiology , business problem-solving , job-seeker writing , and legal education show that when AI tools are thoughtfully embedded into training workflows, less-experienced workers can improve their independent performance. On the other hand, recent experiments with software engineers , management consultants , high school students , and clinicians demonstrate that while AI serves as a temporary exoskeleton that boosts immediate output, those gains often fail to persist once the tool is removed. Understanding how AI can erode or enhance expertise requires three elements rarely found together: (1) sustained AI usage embedded in ordinary professional work over months rather than hours, (2) a credible evaluation of unassisted judgment when AI is unavailable, and (3) blinded grading by domain experts. In “ Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting ”, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research , we describe a field experiment used to capture changes in both short-term productivity and longer-term skill building that occur as a result of AI usage in the highly expertise-intensive profession of intellectual property law. In our experiment, we randomized access to a then-unreleased Google Labs AI patent writing assistant tool, now part of Gemini Notebook , among 133 lawyers at eleven intellectual property law firms that are engaged in regular, non-exclusive business with Google. Two-thirds of lawyers at each firm (“treatment” group) were given early access to the tool, while the remainder ("control" group) were given some training on how to use AI but were withheld from using the tool until after the three-month study period.