Every wave of productivity technology arrives with a promise that it will finally make teamwork better. Generative AI is the current one, and perhaps the last one.

With Qing Xiao, Xinlan Emily Hu, Arvind Karunakaran, Hong Shen, and Hancheng Cao, we followed a project-based software development organization longitudinally from 2023 to 2025 — through the period in which generative AI tools went from novelty to default — to see what actually changed in how teams collaborated. The preprint is on arXiv.

The short version of what we found is in the title: AI hasn’t fixed teamwork. It has, however, shifted the collaborative culture in measurable and sometimes surprising ways — in who does what, in what counts as a contribution, and in the texture of day-to-day coordination. That’s a distinct finding from either “AI is transformative” or “AI changes nothing,” and it lines up with a broader pattern in our team research: the effects of a new tool depend on the task, the team, and the culture they arrive into.