Why This AI Study Matters to Your Business
If you run a Malaysian SME, you are probably already seeing a familiar pattern: AI can help your team produce polished work quickly, but polished work is not automatically useful work. A well-written marketing plan can still miss your customer, ignore local buying behaviour, or copy the same ideas your competitors are using.
A new randomized experiment involving more than 1,000 first-year students at Bocconi University offers a practical lesson for business owners. The study found that ChatGPT access improved the quality, coherence and professionalism of student work, while critical-thinking training helped students produce more varied and original ideas. When students received both, they gained the broadest combination of benefits.
For you, the message is straightforward: do not treat AI as a replacement for judgement. Build a workflow where AI improves execution, while your people remain responsible for asking better questions, testing assumptions and choosing what should actually be done.
What Happened
Researchers from Bocconi University, working with OpenAI Economic Research, assigned more than 1,000 first-year undergraduate students to one of four groups: students with access to ChatGPT, students receiving causal-reasoning training, students receiving both, or students receiving neither. The students completed a real-world business case involving marketing recommendations for the university’s merchandise store. Source: OpenAI
The ChatGPT group used GPT-4o and was assessed by trained human graders using a five-point rubric. Researchers also used automated text analysis to examine the number and variety of ideas, evidence of causal reasoning and similarity to recommendations written by experts. Students with ChatGPT access scored almost one point higher on the five-point scale. Their work included more ideas, clearer logic and stronger similarity to expert recommendations. Source: OpenAI
The critical-thinking exercise focused on causal reasoning: understanding why a solution might work, what causes an outcome and when an approach might fail. These students did not score higher on the standard grading rubric, which focused on two conventional marketing goals. However, their submissions contained a wider range of ideas that were more distinct from those produced by their peers. Source: OpenAI
Students who received both ChatGPT access and critical-thinking training showed the combined effects. Their work was more logically coherent and showed stronger evidence of questioning assumptions and explaining cause and effect, while also retaining broader idea variety. Source: OpenAI
AI helped students make their answers better. Critical-thinking training helped make their ideas broader. For an SME, the strongest workflow combines both.
Why This Matters for Malaysian SMEs
Your team may use AI for social media captions, customer replies, sales proposals, product descriptions, recruitment documents or internal reports. These tasks benefit from clearer writing and faster drafting. ChatGPT can help a junior employee turn scattered notes into a structured proposal, prepare several versions of a WhatsApp response or organise customer feedback into themes.
However, the same tools can make weak thinking look convincing. A generic campaign for a Malaysian café, tuition centre, furniture shop or home-services business may sound professional while failing to reflect local realities such as Bahasa Malaysia preferences, bilingual customer communication, festive-season demand, delivery limitations, neighbourhood-level competition or differences between urban and non-urban customers.
That is where critical thinking becomes operational rather than academic. Before asking AI to produce an answer, your team should define the customer problem, identify the assumptions behind the proposed solution and consider what evidence would show whether it worked. For example, “increase sales” is too broad. A better question may be: “Will a weekday lunch bundle increase repeat visits among nearby office workers, and what other factor could explain any change?”
The experiment also shows why you should not judge employees only by the final document. If AI makes everyone’s reports more polished, a neat presentation no longer proves deep understanding. Ask employees to explain their reasoning, compare alternatives and identify risks. This makes it easier to distinguish genuine problem-solving from lightly edited AI output.
Practical SME Use Cases
| Business task | Use AI for | Require human judgement on |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing campaign | Generate campaign structures and copy variations | Customer relevance, cultural fit and testable assumptions |
| Customer service | Draft polite, consistent replies | Escalation, empathy and exceptions |
| Sales proposals | Organise information and clarify benefits | Whether the recommendation solves the buyer’s real problem |
| Operations | Summarise issues and suggest process options | Root causes, staff impact and implementation risks |
How to Build This Into Your Workflow
Start with a simple two-stage process. In the first stage, ask your employee to produce their own initial thinking before using AI. This can be a short list of customer observations, possible causes and alternative solutions. In the second stage, use ChatGPT to challenge, expand and organise those ideas rather than allowing it to generate the entire answer from an empty prompt.
A useful prompt might be: “Review these three campaign ideas. Identify the assumptions behind each, explain what could cause each idea to succeed or fail, and suggest one overlooked customer segment.” This encourages analysis instead of passive acceptance.
Next, ask the employee to verify the output. AI-generated content may include incorrect claims, unsuitable recommendations or assumptions that do not apply to your industry. For Malaysian SMEs, verification may include checking product availability, delivery coverage, operating hours, regulatory requirements, customer language and the accuracy of local references.
Finally, record what happened after implementation. Did enquiries increase? Did customers understand the offer? Did staff follow the new process? Did complaints change? Your team should compare the result with the original assumption. This turns AI use into a learning cycle rather than a one-off writing shortcut.
The Bigger Picture
The study points to a broader change in how businesses should evaluate knowledge work. When AI can produce expert-like structure and fluent language, the value of an employee’s contribution increasingly lies in problem definition, judgement, originality and follow-through.
This does not mean every SME needs a complex AI policy or a large training programme. You can begin with a short internal standard: employees may use approved AI tools for drafting and analysis, but they remain accountable for accuracy, customer suitability, confidentiality and final decisions.
You should also measure more than speed. Track whether AI-assisted work leads to fewer repeated questions, clearer handovers, better campaign experiments, faster response times or improved customer outcomes. A document that is completed quickly but creates confusion is not a productivity gain.
The most resilient Malaysian SMEs will likely be those that combine automation with practical business judgement. Let AI handle repetitive structure and first drafts. Let your people contribute local knowledge, customer understanding and the willingness to test whether an idea works.
Your Next Step
Choose one recurring workflow this week, such as replying to enquiries or preparing marketing ideas. Ask your team to document the initial problem, use ChatGPT to improve and challenge their thinking, verify the result, and review the outcome after implementation. This small experiment can show where AI genuinely helps your business and where human reasoning must remain firmly in control.
The lesson from the Bocconi experiment is not that AI wins or critical thinking wins. Each improves a different part of the work. For you, the opportunity is to design a system where both strengths are used together.
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