Most human collaboration happens in small groups and this is where the core of CI research is focused. Building on previous work in organisational psychology, behavioural economics and group dynamics, researchers are now trying to understand and enhance the CI of teams.

Future Horizons:

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5-yearhorizon

Understanding of team structure and behaviour aids CI

Researchers develop a better understanding of the team structures and behaviours that negatively impact CI, making it possible to develop strategies to neutralise them. Simple AI-powered facilitators designed to lubricate group deliberations become commonplace.

10-yearhorizon

AI moderates discussions

Decisions in crucial areas like medicine and criminal justice are made by systems that combine individual human knowledge, orchestrated collective intelligence and AI supervision. More advanced AI systems are now able to moderate discussions between groups of humans in ways designed to enhance CI.

25-yearhorizon

Brain interfaces augment human deliberation

A combination of AI and crowd intelligence provides the populace with a form of "cognitive autocomplete" via brain interfaces that help them quickly access important information and augment their ability to deliberate.

This involves solving several challenges, including goal alignment, task prioritisation, progress tracking, maintaining attention, distribution of responsibilities and ensuring that deliberative processes are efficient and equitable. This is becoming increasingly complicated, as more fluid organisational structures mean team composition and structure is often dynamic¹⁶. Globalisation and the rise of hybrid work also means teams frequently work remotely and asynchronously, raising new challenges for group cohesion.¹⁷

Nonetheless, research into group dynamics is providing simple yet powerful insights into how to improve the CI of small groups. These include intermittent breaks in collaboration,¹⁸ boosting the variety of solutions explored¹⁹ and ensuring the right balance of cognitive diversity and gender.²⁰ ²¹ It is also laying the foundations for new tools to enhance team performance. These include real-time visualisations of how much effort members are putting in,²² information dashboards that summarise people's skills²³ and chatbots that help teams allocate work based on members’ expertise.²⁴ AI is an increasingly important tool, particularly to orchestrate the thought of large groups, to synthesise evidence in particular fields or for the organisation of meetings.

Recent breakthroughs in LLMs also enable sophisticated analysis of conversational dynamics²⁵ and are opening up the prospect of AI agents working alongside humans in hybrid teams.²⁶ These agents could be a crucial tool for asynchronous collaboration, acting as a “shared brain” for the group and keeping team dialogue flowing even when members can’t speak directly. They could ultimately act as moderators, steering group deliberations to boost CI.

Smarter teams - Anticipation Scores

The Anticipation Potential of a research field is determined by the capacity for impactful action in the present, considering possible future transformative breakthroughs in a field over a 25-year outlook. A field with a high Anticipation Potential, therefore, combines the potential range of future transformative possibilities engendered by a research area with a wide field of opportunities for action in the present. We asked researchers in the field to anticipate:

The uncertainty related to future science breakthroughs in the field
The transformative effect anticipated breakthroughs may have on research and society
The scope for action in the present in relation to anticipated breakthroughs.

This chart represents a summary of their responses to each of these elements, which when combined, provide the Anticipation Potential for the topic. See methodology for more information.