Kimberly Goes to Business School #1: Designing the Experiment

Kimberly Goes to Business School is a numbered series within my Business Different column. It will chronicle Biscochito’s field study with Harvard Business School and Tulane University.

We are moving our entire organization to collaborative scheduling. That decision is not part of the study. It is the starting point.

In the first week of March, Biscochito begins its first formal field study with researchers from Harvard Business School and the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. The study asks a focused question: can an AI assistant support caregivers as they take control of their schedules, and, in doing so, strengthen collaboration across the organization?

Half of our caregivers will use an AI tool built for this transition. The other half will be supported by Nina Martinez and Roberta Payne, our liaisons. Researchers have conducted extensive interviews and are collecting quantitative data that will continue throughout the study.

What they are not studying is whether we should move to collaborative scheduling. That decision applies to the entire organization.

After twenty years in caregiving, building agencies, supporting caregivers, and working alongside thousands of people inside other people’s homes, I know this: if caregiving is going to be sustainable as a profession, caregivers must have (1) a consistent, reliable schedule, (2) a substantively supportive community, and (3) the highest hourly wage possible.

Scheduling sits at the center of all three.

In most home care organizations, scheduling is centralized. A coordinator assigns shifts, manages call-outs, and resolves conflicts. As organizations grow, they add more oversight. The structure scales by adding coordination from above.

That oversight costs money. It also reduces peer interdependence. When scheduling problems move to centralized control, caregivers have fewer reasons to rely on one another.

Our decision is to shift that responsibility outward.

Caregivers will coordinate coverage within their teams. They will resolve conflicts directly. They will manage continuity together.

The AI assistant is not being designed simply to automate scheduling tasks. It is being designed to prompt interaction, to surface availability to peers, to nudge communication, and to encourage caregivers to solve scheduling issues together rather than default upward. The goal is to increase interconnection and asynchronous collaboration inside a workforce that works together, but rarely in the same place at the same time.

When I explained to the research team that the AI should increase caregiver-to-caregiver reliance, not reduce it, the response was that this is not a common design heuristic. Most modern technological advances reduce human interaction. We are testing whether one can strengthen it.

The aim is not efficiency or novelty. It is durability.

If caregivers build stronger working relationships with one another, collaboration around client care improves. If coordination happens laterally instead of vertically, we create strong layered working relationships rather than expanding oversight. If dollars stay with caregivers, the profession becomes more viable.

When Jasmijn Bol, Ph.D., from the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, and Dennis Campbell, Ph.D., from Harvard Business School, presented the study design to a room of academics, several attendees asked whether we were testing if we would move to collaborative scheduling.

We were not.

That decision had already been made.

The study examines how to support the move, not whether to make it.

This series will follow what happens as design moves into practice: how caregivers respond, how the AI shapes interaction, what the data reveals, and where the structure requires adjustment.

The academic partnership does not define the shift.

It allows us to examine it with discipline.

In March, the study begins.

We are not testing whether caregivers can collaborate.

We are testing whether we can design a system that makes collaboration stronger over time.

This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on February 17, 2026, under Business Different.