📌 Key facts

🔹 Mission: We, the AI Strategy Research Cluster TUM X BCG, explore how humans shape the value of AI through trust, interaction, and organisational integration. Our goal is to uncover the behavioural and structural factors that determine whether AI creates real impact or fails to deliver.

🔹 Starting date: Start anytime. Applications open now!

🔹 How to apply: Send an email including your CV and grade report, and research interest (Details at the end of this page).

Contents

• 💡 Background
• 🧠 Topics of Interest
• 🦾Who We Are
• 🎓 Expectations
• 📄 Requirements to any Work
• 📬 How to Apply

💡 Background

Our AI Strategy Research Cluster at TUM x BCG is on a mission to uncover how AI truly creates value beyond the hype. While many organisations have launched GenAI initiatives, few can demonstrate measurable top- or bottom-line impact. We believe that one potential missing link lies in how humans interact with AI: How they trust it, adapt to it, and integrate it into workflows and decision-making. From cognitive biases in Human-AI interaction to cross-level productivity effects and organisational learning loops, we investigate what really drives or hinders AI success. Our work blends behavioural science, organisational theory, and rigorous empirical methods to tackle one of the most pressing questions in today's digital transformation: What conditions must be met for AI to deliver on its promise? Join us to push the frontier of AI research and help shape the future of human-centred AI adoption in real-world organisations.

🧠 Topics of Interest

• Trust in AI and Human-AI Interaction: Investigating how user diversity, confidence, explainability, and AI likability shape trust, reliance calibration, and oversight in human–AI collaboration
• Productivity Gains Across Levels: Examining the causal and cross-level effects of AI assistance on productivity from individual task performance to team throughput and organisational outcomes
• Cognitive and Behavioural Mechanisms: Exploring the role of cognitive flexibility, overconfidence, and behavioural adaptation as mediators of effective Human-AI Interaction
• Task- and Context-Dependence of AI ROI: Understanding how task characteristics (routine vs. uncertain, high- vs. low-stakes) and contextual moderators (uncertainty, stakes, baseline expertise) influence the net value of AI augmentation
• Organisational Dynamics of AI Adoption: Analysing how organisational learning, feedback loops, and governance structures amplify or undermine AI value — including conditions under which AI adoption backfires

Potential outcomes:

• Systematic literature review
• Review of related experimental studies
• Development of a concept and experimental design

🦾Who We Are

We are a research collaboration between the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), focused on exploring the business value of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI. Combining academic depth with industry relevance, we investigate how AI creates measurable impact across organizations spanning people, processes, platforms, and policies. Our work is grounded in real-world implementations and aims to produce actionable insights for both scholarly and managerial audiences. The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organisations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership, and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organisations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs

🎓 Expectations

• Applicants should have interest in Human-AI Interaction, basic knowledge of organisational and behavioural concepts and dynamics, and motivation for interdisciplinary thinking (management, computer science psychology, organisational behaviour)
• Strong academic track record
• Reliable, structured, precise and self-driven working style

📄 Requirements to any Work

We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:

• Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
• Slide Deck - summarise your research and possibly present it
• optional: Medium Article - let people outside the university know about your research and start your personal brand

📬 How to Apply

📌 Send us a brief application including:

✅ Your CV

✅ Your Transcript of Records/Grade Report(Transcript of Records)

✅ Your preferred starting date & your research interest/motivation

📩 E-Mail an: svea.feldmann@tum.de // Svea Feldmann

Please reach out in case of any question! We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you! 🚀