The One-Person Team: AI's Effect on Working Alone
For most of the past half century, the share of research papers written by a single person fell steadily as science became more specialized. A July 2026 preprint by Matsui reports that the decline stopped after ChatGPT's release in late 2022. Across more than 300 million works in 26 fields, solo authorship leveled off and in some fields began to climb. The shift was largest where a coauthor's usual contribution, such as drafting, analysis or literature review, overlaps with what a language model can do, and smallest where collaboration happens at a lab bench or a field site. The study counts names on a byline. It says nothing about whether the solo papers are better or worse.
Code written alone
Hoffmann and colleagues at Harvard followed 187,000 open-source developers after they got access to GitHub Copilot. Time spent coding rose 12.4 percent, time on project management fell 24.9 percent, and peer collaboration events dropped by almost 80 percent. The authors describe developers using the tool to get around the friction of coordinating with others. Their sample is open-source maintainers, who already have more autonomy than most salaried engineers, so the numbers may not carry over to corporate teams. A separate study by Song and coauthors found that peripheral contributors gained less from Copilot than core maintainers and saw their coordination time go up.
The places where programmers answered each other's questions have also thinned. Writing in PNAS Nexus in 2024, del Rio-Chanona and coauthors found Stack Overflow activity fell about 25 percent within six months of ChatGPT's launch compared with similar forums, a figure they treat as a lower bound. Another study found Reddit programming communities held steady and traced most of Stack Overflow's losses to newer users, the people who most needed answers from someone more experienced.
The case for working alone
The strongest evidence that one person with AI can stand in for a team comes from a field experiment at Procter & Gamble. In "The Cybernetic Teammate," Dell'Acqua and colleagues found that individuals working with AI matched the performance of teams working without it. Commercial and technical employees using AI also produced proposals that drew on both specialties rather than reflecting their own department's priorities.
Team settings change how people use the tools. In a study of 96 undergraduates, LLM use fell 42.7 percentage points when students moved from solo assignments to team projects, and the share who tested AI-generated code fell 19.4 points.
Who learns from whom
Stanford's "Canaries in the Coal Mine" paper by Brynjolfsson and colleagues finds employment of 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations running 19 percent below trend in its 2026 revision, with no comparable gap for experienced workers. The declines cluster in jobs where AI takes over tasks and are weaker where it assists workers. The authors call the pattern descriptive. Entry-level jobs are where people have usually learned a trade by working beside someone who already knows it.
Surveys point the same way, with the limits of self-reporting. BambooHR found the typical employee among 1,608 surveyed spends 56 percent of the day working alone, and 48 percent said mentoring across generations has become harder. In a survey of more than 22,000 employees, 59 percent said they ask colleagues for second opinions less often and 46 percent said they know less about how coworkers think. Workday's 2026 survey of 2,150 employees found one in five Gen Z workers feel lonelier since they started using AI. Tang and colleagues, in four experiments published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, linked frequent AI use at work to loneliness, insomnia and after-work drinking, while noting the results are associations.
Studies reviewed by MIT Sloan Management Review found AI raised the quality of individual output while narrowing the range of ideas across a group. Keeping people in charge of early creative work preserved much of that range, and a 2026 counter-study found that prompting AI with varied personas can do the same.
Film and the one-person company
Outside science and software the evidence is mostly reporting. TechCrunch covered Google's Flow Sessions program for filmmakers under the headline "Faster, cheaper, lonelier." Director Hal Watmough told the outlet he had become a one-man band and that no one should have to make a film that way, and participants described filling roles they had no training for. Nasdaq research reported by Axios found applications for one-person businesses up more than 20 percent since early 2025 while applications from likely employers stayed flat, with nearly half the growth in high-AI-adoption industries. No study yet measures how team sizes have changed in film, design, law or marketing.
