AI’s next frontier in research is managing projects

Automating steering and coordination can free up human expertise, say Henry Sauermann and Maximilian Köhler

Discussions of artificial intelligence in academia have tended to focus on its impact on student learning and implications for admissions and exams. A less discussed but significant impact of AI lies in its transformative potential for research.

There are now many examples where AI has performed functional research tasks as a ‘worker’, augmenting the role of human scientists or taking over certain tasks. AI tools have been used to aid literature reviews, for example, while machine-learning models have predicted experimental outcomes.