Personality Pairing Improves Human-AI Collaboration

Here we examine how AI agent "personalities" interact with human personalities to shape human-AI collaboration and performance. In a large-scale, preregistered randomized experiment, we paired 1,258 participants with AI agents prompted to exhibit varying levels of the Big Five personality traits. These human-AI teams produced 7,266 display ads for a real think tank, which we evaluated using 1,995 independent human raters and a field experiment on X that generated nearly 5 million impressions. We found that human and AI personalities individually shaped ad quality and teamwork. When examined together, human-AI personality pairings directly effected ad quality outcomes. For example, extraverted humans paired with conscientious AI produced the lowest-quality ads, followed by conscientious humans paired with agreeable AI and neurotic humans paired with conscientious AI. In the field experiment, ad quality significantly influenced ad performance, measured by click-through rates and cost-per-click, and neurotic humans paired with neurotic AI achieved higher click-through rates, even after controlling for ad quality. Together, these results provide the first large-scale causal experimental evidence that specific personality pairings can improve human-AI collaboration and motivate future research on the implications of AI personalization for performance and teamwork dynamics in human-AI teams.