AI Reports · Stanford Digital Economy Lab · 2026-10-07 · Research paper
Task Expansion with Generative AI: Experimental Evidence on Middle-Skilled, Early-Career Workers - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
This field experiment with 673 final-year IT apprentices at twelve German vocational schools examines whether generative AI expands the set of tasks that middle-skilled, early-career workers can perform. AI raised productivity substantially across all task types, and on tasks beyond the apprentices' formal training, productivity rose by 26–31 percentage points. These gains did not come at the cost of immediate task comprehension.