How can artificial intelligence (AI) improve human productivity in business? At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, new research states AI has the potential to improve productivity across teams by 40%. Generative AI apps like ChatGPT 4.0, Gemini, Grok and others represent current high-performance additions for business teams to improve their productivity.
Off stage, another technology, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), still in the early stages of development, may actually rewire our brains to make us smarter, sharper and even telepathic.
Teams that embrace these disruptive technologies could potentially be more focused, collaborative, and profitable. Will employers ask or force workers to accept BCIs? Can they?
Watch out! The disruptive technology train has only started to head from the station and business is among its destinations.
Generative AI (GenAI) tools are already having a huge impact in business, creating data-driven insights that support faster, better decision-making. To give some perspective, research indicates that over 50% of U.S. business teams are using genAI with those teams making decisions based on data, rather than instinct, 19% more likely to be profitable. GenAI tools find patterns in vast volumes of data that most humans overlook.
Despite genAI’s widespread use, however, 91% of employees say they find inadequate workplace technology a hindrance with 77% stating they would feel more committed to the job with more reliable technology tools on hand.
Businesses take heed. Efficient laptop deployment improves employee productivity. Adding GenAI app tools on laptops seems like a no brainer.
New research indicates that BCIs can give high-performance teams an edge by improving attention, memory, and executive brain function. The way BCIs work is surprisingly simple. Scalp sensors monitor the brain’s electrical signals, which are then used to retrain the brain. Team members can watch their brain activity on a monitor in real-time, and teach their brains to replace unproductive habits with useful ones. This process of rewiring the brain is called neuroplasticity, and increases a brain’s capacity to learn and adapt. Fascinatingly, neuroplasticity is a defining feature of high-performance teams, who are 92% more innovative than weaker teams who don’t like to challenge themselves to learn new things regularly.
BCI technology can be worn like a bathing cap or be implanted as a chip on a brain’s surface. Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is at the forefront of implantable brain chips. A “Link” neural chip can be used to control devices including keyboards and a mouse using thought. A team with Neuralink implants could collaborate and share ideas simply by thinking. This is the ultimate sci-fi scenario where humans communicate telepathically.
Currently, Neuralink’s Link detects approximately 10,000 synapses. Future iterations will link to far more considering that the human brain contains as many as a quadrillion.
The next generation of Link chips will be biological containing living neurons with the potential to enhance cognitive performance for individuals and teams to levels never anticipated.
From a legal perspective, compelling employees to get chipped may be a bridge too far. GenAI has been adopted with minimal controversy. BCI is an entirely different ballgame entering the realm of body augmentation. In the United States, California, Missouri, and Ohio have passed laws prohibiting employers from mandating employees to get chipped. Other jurisdictions are considering similar legislation. Interestingly, the laws don’t stop employees themselves getting chipped of their own free will.
Imagine how much more unfair this can make an already tough job market. How can regular job seekers compete with those who choose to get augmented? Will future laws prohibit employers from picking those candidates who have already been chipped?
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Connecting my brain to the cloud using BCI, a brain-computer interface, is something I’m looking forward to. Just imagine your ability to “think and Google,” see through the eyes of a robot and increase your intelligence through 24×7 access to AIs like Gemini 3.0 and GPT-5.
One of Ray Kurzweil’s famous predictions was that “by the early 2030s, we’ll achieve a high-bandwidth connection between the human neocortex and the Cloud,” to enhance our intelligence.
I used to think that Ray got this prediction wrong. His predictive record to date has been ~86%, but I didn’t see this happening that soon, that is until I met Max Hodak and learned about his pioneering breakthroughs at Science Corporation.
Our brains will never grow bigger. They are landlocked by the skull, which in turn is limited in size by a woman’s birth canal. The only way, therefore, to increase our intelligence by a factor of ten or more is by connecting it using high bandwidth to an external knowledge source. Enter the field of BCI.
BCI is a rapidly advancing field with more than 250 companies (as of 2024) involved that have attracted approximately $2.3 billion in cumulative venture funding. Companies like Neuralink, Paradromics, OpenWater, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, and Blackrock Neurotech are the leaders and they are making significant strides in BCI human trials and in getting FDA approvals.
But despite progress and some flashy demos, current BCI technology is still somewhat barbaric and faces serious limitations. Traditional electro-mechanical implants are invasive, often damaging brain tissue during insertion, while non-invasive approaches like EEGs provide only very coarse neural readings. This makes testing BCI implants hard to justify for all but the most serious conditions.
Enter Science Corporation, led by CEO Max Hodak, former President of Neuralink, with a revolutionary approach that could change everything: a biohybrid neural interface that uses living neurons to grow non-destructively into brain tissue, connecting external circuitry with the internal wiring in the brain.
“Placing anything into the brain inevitably destroys some amount of brain tissue,” explains Hodak. “Destroying 10,000 cells to record from 1,000 might be perfectly justified if you have a serious injury and those thousand neurons create a lot of value—but it really hurts as a scaling characteristic.”
What is Science Corporation’s solution? A remarkable silicon honeycomb-like structure with 100,000 “microwells,” tiny cylindrical holes roughly 15 micrometres deep, where individual living neurons cultured from neural stem cells can grow from the microwell circuitry directly into a subject’s brain tissue.
When placed onto the brain’s surface, the neural stem cells grow axons and dendrites down into the host’s brain tissue. As these biological “roots” grow into brain tissue they naturally integrate, forming synaptic connections, creating a biological bridge between mind and machine, and they do this without physically destroying the brain tissue around them.
Max Hodak’s technology promises the potential to increase the bandwidth of BCI technology on the order of 100 to 10,000 times greater than what we’ve seen with Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
The implications are staggering. In recent experiments published on bioRxiv, the team demonstrated that mice with these implants could detect and respond to light signals through the device, suggesting successful integration between the implanted neurons and the animals’ native brain cells.
Alan Mardinly, Director of Biology at Science Corporation, explains:
“The principal advantages of a biohybrid implant are that it can dramatically change the scaling laws of how many neurons you can interface with versus how much damage you do to the brain.”
The near-term implications are profound for helping patients with ALS communicate, enabling paralyzed individuals to control computer cursors, and facilitating rehabilitation for stroke victims.
The long-term potential is mind-boggling:
As we progress toward Kurzweil’s vision of seamless brain-cloud connectivity, Science Corporation’s biohybrid approach may be the breakthrough for which we have been waiting to meld human and machine minds.
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