From Sherwood News, February 14:
Researchers measured gains and trade-offs from human customer service reps using an AI assistant. One big win? Fewer angry customers.
The tech giants are spending hundreds of billions to build out massive infrastructure needed for an imminent economy where AI supercharges productivity and boosts economic growth. That’s the theory, anyway. But how much will AI actually boost productivity in business? It’s very much an open question, with a paucity of data available.
But in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a research paper presents some hard data on the topic. Titled “Generative AI at Work,” the paper shares research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, which measured productivity of real workers in an industry prime for AI-powered improvements: customer service. Their findings offer an important, early look at the value of incorporating AI in business.
The researchers found that when human customer service agents used an AI assistant, the company saw a 15% boost in productivity on average. But the gains were not evenly distributed. Less experienced agents saw the biggest boosts in productivity and speed, while more experienced agents saw smaller gains in speed and a slight decrease in quality. AI really helped when handling “moderately rare problems,” where the human agent might lack the knowledge to resolve the issue.
One of the other benefits of the use of AI assistants was that it helped international workers improve their fluency in English. After AI was introduced, the data showed big jumps in scores for “comprehensibility” and “native fluency” (i.e. the person seemed like a native American English speaker)....
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