Wharton study: Game studios restructuring around AI

Wharton's Generative AI Labs interviewed 20 game studios and found a four-stage pattern: individuals get productivity gains from copy-and-paste chatbot use, but organizations stall when they try top-down workflow automation because so much coordination runs on unwritten tacit knowledge. The bigger gains, the researchers say, came from individuals crossing team boundaries themselves, and the largest of all from three studios built around AI from founding, where small generalist teams collapsed a four-month vertical slice into four weeks. The catch is that only 3 of 20 reached that stage, and none did it by retrofitting an existing structure.