With Artificial Intelligence (AI) being discussed often in the workplace, there exists anxiety among workers in many industries – including software engineers, finance and administrative personnel – around the idea of job security. Fear not: a recent paper published by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond, which focused on a Fortune 500 study with 5000 customer support agents in the Philippines, shows that AI can be beneficial to the productivity and retention of individual workers, especially if it is a supplementary tool for the humans.
The AI system used in the study, a GPT-based large language model and machine learning algorithm, was tailored to provide suggested responses to customer inquiries and provide agents with helpful internal documentation from the company. On average, using this AI tool boosted productivity for the workers by 14%, with a significant increase of 35% for the lowest-skilled employees. When it comes to retention, using the AI tool decreased the likelihood of an agent leaving for the month by a whopping 8.6 percentage points.
While the AI system was not found to help the more experienced and skilled workers, it did have a major impact on those who were relatively new to the company. The study noted that “treated agents with two months of tenure perform just as well as untreated agents with over six months of tenure.” This clearly demonstrated how the AI system was capturing the experience and knowledge of the higher-skilled employees, and as a result, making it accessible to those with lesser skills.
The authors of the paper also note that the study showed that the employees were overall happier with the AI system, as they were now able to give better answers to customer inquiries, which, in turn, led to high customer sentiment. This study and similar experiences from individuals in many sectors have also highlighted a different way of using software, as it is now able to capture knowledge and share it with other workers as opposed to being coded explicitly.
Erik Brynjofsson is a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI and the director for the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. In an interview with Insider, he said that this AI system was a game-changer for productivity and the way software is used for capturing critical information. He further mentioned how bots like ChatGPT are being increasingly used in various sectors, from education to customer service, and have come to be seen as helpful and powerful, despite the initial predilection – as long as they are used as a supplemental aid and not as a replacement for human workers.
