Mert Demirer

Research, by assistant professor Mert Demirer, associate professor John Horton, Peyman Shahidi (PhD candidate), and co-authors models production as a sequence of interdependent steps and shows that it is this interdependence that determines the true extent of the gains enabled by AI. "We are seeking to understand the effect of AI at the overall system level, not as a one-off productivity tool applied on a task-by-task basis," said Shahidi.

"I will expect some impact on the legal profession's labor market, but not major," said assistant professor Mert Demirer. "AI is going to be very useful in terms of information discovery and summary," he said, but for complex legal tasks, "the law's low risk tolerance, plus the current capabilities of AI, are going to make that case less automatable at this point."

Experts say the transition to an A.I.-powered workplace is likely to be more gradual, in many cases occurring as new companies, built to exploit A.I., take market share from more established companies that are slower to embrace it. "Widespread adoption is going to happen at the new firms," said assistant professor Mert Demirer. "It's always the case that the smaller the production process, the more the process is easier to change."

A paper co-authored by assistant professor Mert Demirer found that software developers who used an A.I. coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25 percent. Demirer said that a software developer's job could change over the longer term, so that the human coder would become a kind of project manager overseeing multiple A.I. assistants.