Events

Mr. Gabriel Cavalli
Ph.D. Candidate
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

This study investigates how principal investigators (PIs), acting as managers of their academic laboratories, adapt their organizations in response to an advance in AI that improves solutions to a scientific problem that they previously had committed to address. It hypothesizes that generalist PIs reduce lab size and balance organizational expertise toward generalism, while specialist PIs expand lab size and hire more computer science specialists. These hypotheses are tested within the setting of academic labs participating in the CASP competition, where Google DeepMind’s AI-based entry, AlphaFold, achieved unprecedented success in modeling the “protein-folding” problem in 2018. The findings support the hypotheses and emphasize the crucial role of managerial judgment, informed by expertise, in shaping responses to AI-driven innovations and integrating human and artificial intelligences within organizations.