A new study from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that experienced workers have more to worry about with the rise of chatbot technology. The research indicated that employees using chatbot AI in customer support saw a 14% uptick in productivity compared to those who did not utilize the AI assistant.
The researchers surveyed more than 5,000 customer service agents from a Fortune 500 Company. A portion of these employees were given a “recent version” of OpenAI’s GPT large language models, although the specific version was not listed. Productivity was monitored based on how quickly customer support agents could resolve customer requests and their total number of cases per hour.
The study found that the least experienced and lower skill workers still benefited the most from the AI assistant. They were able to complete their work 35% faster with the help of AI. This suggests that new or low-skilled workers can use AI to “leap” through more mundane tasks and catch up with their more experienced peers quickly. Meanwhile, highly experienced workers may not see much immediate benefit from the AI tool, as its recommendations are likely similar to procedures they have already mastered.
This marks the first research looking at the impact of generative AI on a workforce that is still living. The customer support industry has been one of the biggest adopters of AI technology so far, making it the ideal field for studying such applications.
Overall, the study suggests that the productivity gains from AI tools tend to be beneficial for less experienced and lower skill workers, as those are the ones who initially saw the greatest performance improvement. In terms of compensation, the study raised questions regarding how much high-skill workers should be rewarded for providing data to AI systems, given their contribution to model development but overall smaller direct impact on their own productivity.
The mentioned Fortune 500 Company is an enterprise software provider with customer service agents located in the Philippines and the United States. The top performers at the company resolved customer requests twice as quickly as their average counterparts before the introduction of AI — but this difference has started to shrink with the help of AI.
Though many worry that AI technology could cost workers their jobs or result in lower wages, this research presents a slightly different picture. Here, it seems that experienced employees may be at the greatest risk of being replaced by AI, as their skills and expertise can be channeled through an AI system to increase the productivity of the entire company.
When it comes to the person mentioned in this article, the researchers were out of Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and were responsible for the study of generative AI’s impact on a living workforce. The researchers opted to survey customer service agents as the rate of AI adoption in this industry is one of the highest. They concluded their study emphasizing the importance of compensation for employees who provide data to AI systems, and raised questions regarding the amounts that high-skilled workers should be rewarded.
