Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI)
Building a future where we empower organizations to solve society’s toughest, most complex challenges through creativity and intelligence, elegantly engineered in the form of ACI.
Creating optimal collectives of human-machine teams
In partnership with the Consilience Institute
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and getting better every day. Since I was appointed a Fellow at the BCG Henderson Institute, Generative AI systems have taken the world by storm. We are seeing the change that intelligent machines can bring to organizations and the world.
Organizations that want to remain competitive and long-lived must figure out optimal ways of creating human-machine teams. And organizations that figure out how to create optimal collectives of human-machine teams will harness the power of ACI: emergent intelligence from the effective collaboration of human and machine agents to solve shared problems where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Evolving intelligence
We are undergoing a step-change in machine intelligence capabilities. Organizations that figure out how to harness these ahead of competitors will be able to harness winner-take-all dynamics.
ACI enables deeper, faster, broader exploration and exploitation of problem spaces and their associated solution spaces. It brings together diverse, intelligent entities - humans and machines - to understand problems better, seek solutions, learn and adapt, and decide and act. Central to ACI is intelligence distribution - different nodes host different snippets and diverse perspectives. When combined to solve complex challenges, it creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But, the pathway to becoming an ACI-first organization will take time.
Organizations can become smarter
ACI will upgrade organizations by giving them a competitive advantage. The characteristics we can expect to see are:
an improved ability to respond to issues in a more timely and effective way
increase the power and ability of nodes (human and machine) to decide and act
Each of these will have consequences in the ability of organizations to face increasingly complex challenges that require distributed intelligence to come together in a cohesive fashion leveraging the best of the complementary strengths of humans and machines.
But they need help
Current organizational structures and interactions are geared towards humans, with machines relegated to tools that enable humans to perform their work more productively. Current teaming approaches aren’t built for humans and machines. For machines to become effective partners, they need to learn, and current organizational structure and processes don’t capture human-human and human-machine interaction data to facilitate this. Organizations will need actionable steps that carry them along this journey.
A more positive future
In a decade from now, we can expect ACI to be the de facto mode of operation for organizations that are at the vanguard of solving the most complex challenges. Hopefully, humans working at those organizations will have high satisfaction and a sense of contribution and purpose.
But why do we need to create better collectives with humans and machines? Where do current organizational approaches fall short?
We need to act now
The Fellowship will aim to answer these and other questions, leaning on BHI and BCG’s brand and execution capabilities in being managerial generalists who can integrate a coherent strategy from functionally diverse disciplines.
ACI sits at the boundary of Computer Science and Organizational Behavior, where there needs to be more mutual understanding. This positions us to create that understanding through deep research and then bring that as a capability to clients to upgrade them into ACI-first organizations.
In the words of Alan Turing,
“Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible.”
Follow our journey.
Emily Dardaman
Ambassador
BCG Henderson Institute
Emily has spent the past 4+ years with BCG BrightHouse studying what makes work meaningful and how organizations can unlock their purpose.
“In the past year, I’ve discovered an elephant in the purpose room - something that is already having profound and lasting effects on our work, our teams, and our society. AI is the elephant. Whether we build and implement AI systems safely and responsibly will be the single greatest determinant of our shared future.”