We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,172 customer support agents. Access to AI assistance increases worker productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 15\% on average, with substantial heterogeneity across workers. Less experienced and lower-skilled workers improve both the speed and quality of their output while the most experienced and highest-skilled workers see small gains in speed and small declines in quality. We also find evidence that AI assistance facilitates worker learning and improves English fluency, particularly among international agents. While AI systems improve with more training data, we find that the gains from AI adoption are largest for relatively rare problems, where human agents have less baseline training and experience. Finally, we provide evidence that AI assistance improves the experience of work along two key dimensions: customers are more polite and less likely to ask to speak to a manager.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Raymond is an economist studying how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are reshaping the nature of work and competition and their impacts on workers, firms and markets. Starting in July 2024, she has been a postdoctoral fellow in Economics at Microsoft Research and will join Harvard Business School as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2025. From July 2021 to July 2022, she was a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers.
