Can AI boost how teams work together?

The 2025 Microsoft New Future of Work report argues that the central AI-at-work question is shifting from individual to collective productivity. "Last year's report highlighted research showing that AI delivers substantial gains in individual productivity. The next frontier, covered in this year's report, is collective productivity: how teams, organizations, and communities can get better together." The report frames its five-year run as "chapters in a single story of the digital evolution of collaboration," each year building on the last — remote work in 2021, hybrid offices in 2022, LLMs reshaping work in 2023, real-world impact in 2024, and now, collective productivity in 2025.

The report's reasoning is that individual productivity gains are now a settled finding, which makes the open design problem organizational rather than personal. "AI can bridge gaps of time, distance, and scale, but only if built correctly. We must design AI to support shared goals, group context, and the norms of collaboration, and this requires not just new tools but new ways of working." Collective productivity, on this account, will not arrive as a byproduct of better individual tools; it has to be built deliberately into AI systems — shared goals, group context, collaboration norms — alongside changes in how teams actually operate.

This framing cuts against what adoption data elsewhere in the library shows about where AI use is actually heading. Does generative AI shift knowledge workers away from communication? found heavy generative-AI users increasing solo, documentation-focused actions far faster than communication actions — the opposite direction from the collective-productivity frontier this report calls for. It also sits alongside Can generative AI replace the benefits of having a human teammate?, where AI-equipped individuals already matched team-level outcomes without being in a team at all. Read together, that result complicates the report's premise: if individuals with AI already replicate some benefits of collaboration, the "collective productivity" the report is calling for needs to be defined against that AI-augmented-individual baseline, not against individuals working alone without AI.

The excerpt is agenda-setting rather than evidentiary: it announces a shift in research focus and a design mandate, but this section does not itself measure whether AI built around shared goals and group norms produces collective productivity gains — any such evidence would be in the report's body chapters, which this excerpt doesn't include. Microsoft is also a vendor selling collaboration and AI products, so its claim about what AI should be designed to do next carries a commercial stake in collaborative AI being the right next investment, a caveat the excerpt itself does not raise. The implication, held at the strength this excerpt supports, is that the field now treats individual AI productivity gains as reasonably well evidenced but has not yet established a collective-productivity case to match it.