What happened: Customer support agents at a call center saw their productivity rise by 14% when they were given access to an AI conversational assistant, according to a new study from MIT and Stanford researchers.
Details: The research involved over 5,000 call center workers at an unidentified Fortune 500 firm. The chatbot, a "recent version" of an OpenAI GPT model, monitored customer chats and offered suggestions for agents to respond. Over the course of a year, scholars found that agents with the tool were able to resolve 13.8% more issues per hour. The least skilled and experienced benefitted the most, finishing their work 35% faster with the tool.
Where to see the impact: AI will continue to augment and replace workers at call centers. The global market for call center AI is projected to rise from US$800M in 2019 to $2.8B by 2024 , with North America leading the way among regions.
Quotable: The research also suggests that AI chatbots could be more helpful for lower-skilled workers than top performers. This could be because AI "disseminates the potentially tacit knowledge of more able workers and helps new workers move up the experience curve," said MIT Ph.D. candidate and paper co-author Lindsey Raymond.
