Imagine you are working in a three-person team on a challenging bridge design project. Every decision about every truss is critical in the iterative design process. You have a good idea for the next design move to optimise the strength-to-weight ratio for a given truss. You state your case, and two of your teammates disagree, so you're outvoted. Now imagine that both of those teammates were artificial intelligence (AI) agents that overruled you.
As increasingly autonomous AI systems emerge into collaborative team settings, they are starting to take on decision-making roles. How would you feel if your AI teammates contradicted you and outvoted you in your bridge design project? In human-only teams, research indicates that both task conflict and relationship conflict can lead to negative emotional reactions (Brett & Goldberg, 2017; Rispens & Demerouti, 2016; Tekleab et al., 2009). But what about human-AI teams? A fascinating experimental study by Hu and colleagues (2025) explored this question.
The study involved 175 undergraduate engineering students, who each worked across 30 trials to design a bridge structure in a virtual collaborative setting with two AI teammates named Alex and Taylor. Each team member had equal voting power when making decisions about the next best design move when building a bridge structure. Each of the 30 trials presented a unique and challenging design problem, and thus there were no easy solutions. All three team members needed to propose their best design solution. All options were put on the table, then each of the three team members independently cast a vote for the best design solution from those on offer; the majority vote was selected for implementation. The team was then shown whether the decision led to a good or bad outcome for the bridge.
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