Your Team is Using AI Wrong: The Hidden Pattern Behind High-Performing AI Teams

The best teams aren't just using AI differently—they've discovered something deeper about how humans and machines think together. Here's what everyone else is missing.

I didn’t mean for this one to end up at 7200 words, promise. The truth is that team productivity is probably the biggest question swirling around AI and work right now—we see lots of anecdotal evidence that AI helps individuals but team gains are much more difficult to measure.

But AI is in our team work spaces already! AI underlies that PRD you just read, that Pull Request you just reviewed, it’s AI taking notes in the meeting, it’s AI helping your marketing manager come up with 15 LinkedIn post ideas. It’s everywhere, but it’s really hard to figure out how it actually helps us work better as human teams—as more than just individuals.

And the problem slash great thing is, the really interesting stuff gets built in teams! We love working together. And now we have to figure out how to work together with AI. That’s why I wrote this piece. I couldn’t find a thoughtful examination of AI and teams that really squarely faced how prevalent AI already is, and that really squarely addressed why some teams who use AI seem to go much faster than other teams that also use AI (and no, those teams aren’t lying!)

What makes high-performing teams with AI tick? How do you know you’re on a low-performing team, even if you all have ChatGPT subscriptions? (Yes, that happens.) I’ll give you a hint: it’s not just about adopting Agile. It’s not just about re-using the same old 50 years of good management practice to build good teams—those timeless lessons are helpful, but we need to go back to square one in the age of AI—because now we live in a world of distributed cognition.

Read on for a deep dive on what’s changing with AI at work, including characteristics of high- and low-performing teams as well as diagnostic questions to figure out where your team is at and breakthrough ideas to shift the unhelpful AI pattern you may be stuck in. And yes—you can ask those questions and dive in on AI at work even if you’re not a manager! Lots of room for AI champions to upshift team cultures here.

That’s what I’m after here. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the ride…