Lab 01 — Call for Research Partner Companies

Companies see GenAI save time when it generates — and lose that time again when a human verifies the output. If someone spends 10 minutes checking a 1-minute AI draft, the net ROI is zero or negative. Most organisations measure the first number and never the second.

Lab 01 — the Verification & Trust Lab — measures this verification tax in real enterprise conditions and ships the tools companies need to succeed at Westerman Level 1.

The study is pre-registered, double-blind, and mixed-methods, recorded on the Open Science Framework (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/TZNF8) and conducted across four functional domains: Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Project Management. The Spoke roster is confirmed, and the Sample User testing window runs 28 June to 20 July 2026.

We are now recruiting the Partner Companies whose workflows the study measures.

What the study does

Lab 01 separates the verification tax into three measurable layers run against the same task library:

• Layer A — Hub-prompted, expert-verified. Spokes grade outputs blinded to the model.

• Layer B — Your employees write their own prompts in their own working style. This isolates the real cost of everyday AI literacy.

• Layer C — Your employees verify and rate outputs as if about to use them in their own job. This measures real-world acceptability.

Both your employees and our expert graders score outputs without knowing which model produced them — Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The headline result is the gap between the optimistic cell most published studies report and the realistic enterprise cell — with effect sizes attached.

What Partner Companies bring

• 8–15 Sample Users from Marketing, Sales, Finance, and / or Project Management. We are looking for senior practitioners — 10+ years in the functional role, with at least 3 months of active GenAI prompting in their daily work.

• 2 to 2.5 hours per Sample User for the Phase A research session. The session consists of 4 short business tasks from the practitioner's own domain — they prompt the AI, accept a final result, rate it — followed by 6 anonymised outputs from earlier testers that they grade in the same way. One uninterrupted session, or two shorter ones if preferred.

• An optional Phase B in November 2026 — a follow-up ~2-hour session to test the Lab 01 Tools. Invitation only; no commitment at the start.

• Honest feedback on what works and what does not.

The participation is built around your practitioners' working day. No company data is processed; no real client information is used in the test. Synthetic case vignettes anchor in real business contexts but use no client information, no internal documents, and no real names.

What Partner Companies receive

• A tailored Verification Cost Report specific to your industry, company size, and the functional areas your Sample Users come from. This is the headline deliverable.

• A Trust Infrastructure recommendation brief translating the findings into concrete actions for your organisation.

• Early access to the Lab 01 Tools on Partner-Company terms — the GenAI Verification ROI Calculator, the Enterprise GenAI Quality Rubric (Q-Matrix), and the Trust Infrastructure Diagnostic — beta versions available four weeks before any external release.

• A Westerman Level assessment — where you sit on the risk slope today and your readiness for the Level 2 transition.

• Access to EBTHub experts for the implementation of the Tools (optional engagement).

• An invitation to the EBTHub expert network and events.

How we keep your data safe

All GenAI providers in the study operate under enterprise agreements with a Zero-Training Guarantee — prompts and outputs cannot be used to train foundation models. No company data is used in the test. Data is processed under GDPR (Art. 6) with Data Processing Agreements in place; the infrastructure runs in the EU. Telemetry is strictly opt-in per task and bounded to the active GenAI window — it is not employee monitoring. EBTHub provides briefing templates for Works Council clearance.

How to apply

Email office@ebthub.com with the subject line "Lab 01 Research Partner Application" by 20 June 2026.

Tell us your industry, company size, and which functional areas your Sample Users would come from. A short intro call follows within three working days.

Questions about any open call? office@ebthub.com