A new study published today by California Polytechnic State University and Unanimous AI showed that the accuracy of subjective decisions made by business teams can be significantly increased when team-members are connected by AI algorithms modeled after swarms in nature. The process is enabled by an online collaboration platform called Swarm that was unveiled last week at South-by-Southwest and will available soon to all enterprise business teams through a SaaS subscription.

The study demonstrated that business teams working together in the Swarm platform were able to reduce their error rate by 41% in a set of standardized subjective judgement tasks. These results held true, with a high degree of statistical significance, for teams as small as only 3 to 6 members.

This research will be presented on March 14th at the Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC 2019) in San Francisco. The study was conducted across 66 teams. The teams completed the standard subjective judgement test either by (i) working alone, (ii) collaborating by plurality vote, or (iii) connected over the internet using the Swarm platform for amplified collaborative intelligence.

Over 300 participants took part in this study. When working alone, these individuals performed with a 31% error rate on the subjective judgement task. When working together in teams, answering questions by plurality vote, the error rate was reduced to 27%. When using the Swarm platform, the error rate dropped to 16%, which was almost half the number of errors seen by standard voting.

“Successful groups are those whose members can quickly integrate their perspectives,” said Dr. David Askay, an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at California Polytechnic State University. “This study suggests that teams can effectively combine their perspectives to make more accurate decisions when they work together as a real-time swarm, moderated by AI algorithms.”

Swarm Intelligence, the science behind the Swarm platform, is the reason why birds flock, bees swarm, and fish school – they are smarter together than alone. By forming closed-loop systems, these organisms collectively produce insights and make decisions, that greatly exceed the abilities of any individual member. While humans have not evolved this ability naturally, Swarm AI technology enables this artificially, allowing groups to amplify their intelligence by forming real-time swarms.

The paper presented today at FICC outlines many potential applications of the Swarm platform when used by enterprise teams, from optimized sales-forecasting and decision-making, to strategic planning and market research.

“We continue to be amazed by the increase in decision-making accuracy that can be provided to networked teams by the Swarm platform,” said Dr. Louis Rosenberg, CEO and Chief Scientist at Unanimous AI and former Cal Poly Professor, “but this study shows that even small teams can achieve very significant benefits.”

Read the study HERE. 

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