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Fact of the Week: Access to an AI-Based Conversation Assistant Increased Customer Service Productivity by 14 Percent on Average

Fact of the Week: Access to an AI-Based Conversation Assistant Increased Customer Service Productivity by 14 Percent on Average

May 22, 2023

Source: Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 31661, April 2023.

Commentary: In a recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economist Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues analyzed the effects of AI-based conversational assistants on the productivity of customer support agents. Looking at data from 5,179 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 company, the authors found that access to the AI tool increased productivity—measured by customer issues resolved per hour—by 13.8 percent on average. Moreover, productivity gains were greatest for newer and lower-skilled customer support agents. AI assistance was also found to improve customer sentiment, reduce requests for managerial intervention, and improve employee retention.

The AI tool under consideration was built on OpenAI’s General Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) large language model and monitors chats between customers and customer support agents in real time to suggest responses to the agent. The authors argue that the productivity gains (and who experiences them) are due to the AI assistant capturing the implicit knowledge of more experienced, successful agents during its training and transferring that knowledge to less-experienced agents. In this way, the AI tool moves agents along the learning curve; for example, the authors found that agents with two months of tenure and access to the AI assistant were as productive as agents with six months of tenure and who didn’t have access to the tool.

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