We know that collaborating with generative AI (GenAI) can boost workers’ performance on tasks that they already have the skills to complete. But what if GenAI can also help workers perform tasks that they had no chance of completing on their own? That is, not only enhance performance but also expand workers’ capabilities outside their area of expertise?

Our research shows that GenAI can do just that for a company’s workforce—a shift that could not only transform talent strategies but also redefine the competitive landscape for many companies with limited access to expertise.

This new insight into how workers and technology interact comes from BCG Henderson Institute’s recent scientific field experiment, conducted with scholars from Boston University and OpenAI’s Economic Impacts Research Team. While there are many caveats and complexities, the results showing evidence of expanded worker capability have enormous implications for businesses—particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are often constrained by a scarcity of specialists.

Many have postulated that GenAI has the potential to democratize access to expertise for both individuals and businesses. MIT economist David Autor has gone even further, arguing that AI can “help rebuild the middle class” by enabling “a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently reserved for elite experts.” Whether Autor’s theory of middle-class revival plays out or not, the empirical findings from our recent experiment strongly suggest that he’s onto something when it comes to workers and expertise. While by no means substituting for genuine experts, workers using GenAI can sufficiently approximate expert performance to carry out tasks previously beyond their skillset to accomplish.

For businesses, this expansion challenges deep-seated assumptions about talent acquisition strategies that are based on the belief that skills and knowledge rest solely with the individual worker, rather than being a combination of the worker and technology. In the domain of knowledge work, especially as GenAI models continue to develop, we argue that businesses should increasingly use the human-GenAI coupling—the “augmented” worker—as the relevant unit of analysis. Just as an exoskeleton enhances human movement beyond natural limits, GenAI empowers workers to tackle tasks that would otherwise be out of their reach.

Such a shift would not only transform companies’ talent strategies, particularly for hiring and development but also redefine the labor marketplace for companies more generally. SMEs, for example, would be able to punch above their weight by augmenting their workforce with AI capabilities, empowering them to compete with larger companies that have ascended based on superior access to specialized human capital. Levelling the playing field of expertise would enable SMEs to innovate, scale, and deliver high-quality outcomes that were previously out of reach.