The age of AI and access to a wealth of specialist resources has promised a knowledge revolution. Whenever it’s needed at work, whatever job role we have, we can tap into the advice of digital co-workers, the experts and gurus, who can deliver tailored support and insights into the best next move.

That’s important, because it should mean an easy route to mass upskilling and increased productivity, a narrowing of the gap in terms of the top and bottom performers in whatever task is involved: from software programming to people management.

But early evidence suggests people might be ignoring advice. Why? To test this idea, Lancaster University Management School’s Renaud Foucart and Maya Jalloul looked at the behaviours of a particular set of people faced with complex choices, people who would obviously benefit from the extra knowledge and insights of the masters: chess players.

Their research found that most people chose to stick to their own, initial ideas.

“It was the lower-ability chess players, the ones with the most to gain, who lost out from ignoring advice,” says Renaud. “The most able players were also the most likely to follow expert suggestions when it benefited them — suggesting it may have been their tendency to listen to advice that made them better in the first place.”

The findings have wider implications for organisations and whole sectors looking at the use of AI, digital co-working and augmented reality technologies.

“The routine use of AI advice to improve writing or the gathering of information may not translate easily to sectors such as medicine or engineering where subjects have expertise and may want to trust it more at the moment of the decision than any advice they receive. Critically, in terms of public policy, digital literacy and the means of telling good from bad advice will become even more important over time — with lower ability subjects being more at risk of using bad advice.”

This article was initially featured in issue four of Lancaster University's Global Research Newsletter.

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