by ESSEC Knowledge Editor-in-chief
, 21.04.26
With Maren Mickeler
Congratulations to Dr. Maren Mickeler, assistant professor of management at ESSEC Business School, who has received a Schmidt Sciences grant for her research on the workforce effects of new AI tools! The research team, which also includes principal investigator Silvia Castro (INSEAD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Hoa Ho (Co-Investigator, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), and Svenja Friess (Co-Investigator, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), was awarded $200k to pursue their research.
About Schmidt Sciences and the AI at work program
Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. One of their initiatives is the AI at Work program, supporting projects that study AI’s impact on jobs. In 2026, Schmidt Sciences awarded $3 million (USD) to projects that will explore how AI can create value for labor markets and the global economy, and where its effects are likely to be most pronounced. Nineteen projects were chosen, out of over 300 applications. Dr. Mickeler’s research is one such project. Laureates were chosen by a panel including Nobel Laureates in Economics Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, among other illustrious researchers.
How will AI impact jobs in the Global South?
The project, called “From Friction to Function: Generative AI in the Financial Sector of a Low- or Middle Income Country (LMIC)”, explores how generative AI will impact employee productivity, organizational structures, and client outcomes in a major Ugandan bank. The researchers have a longstanding collaboration with the bank, which employs 10,000 staff across Uganda and offers a range of customizable financial products. The study focuses in particular on bankers engaged in knowledge-intensive work, who use their expertise to provide clients with suitable banking solutions. In the experiment, a selected group of bankers (i.e., the treatment group) will use a customized LLM tool to help advise their clientele. The researchers will assess individual worker productivity, organizational climate, organizational structure, client satisfaction, and the quality of the client-banking product match. In doing so, they will be among the first to explore the impact of AI on knowledge work in the Global South, as most of the existing research tends to look at practices in the Global North, entrepreneurship or lower-skilled work. The outputs of the project will allow researchers and policy-makers to develop a better understanding of GenAI’s potential for closing the gap between the Global South and the Global North.
