Tech pessimists and self-centered AI boosters have warned of the rise of this phenomenon chat and others Generative AI systems can Scan entry-level or low-performing jobsAnd But new research says Experienced workers may actually have more to worry about. Customer support agents who use a generic AI conversation assistant in a new study saw a 14% increase in productivity compared to others who didn’t use the tool. Although the introduction of the AI assistant has led to some improvements across the board, research has suggested these gains “Accumulate disproportionately with less experienced and less skilled workers.”
the new Stady It comes from researchers from Stanford University and MIT who found these findings after surveying more than 5,000 customer support agents working for an unnamed Fortune 500 company. A portion of these workers have been granted access to a “fresh version” of an open programGPT large language models for AI, though it’s not clear what exact model they used. The productivity of the workers in this case was determined by how quickly they were able to resolve customer issues and the total amount of customer cases resolved per hour.
The company with the least experience and the lowest According to the research, skilled workers saw the greatest gains from AI tools and were able to complete work 35% faster with the help of the tool. Customer service agents with only two months of experience who used the AI were able to perform just as efficiently as other, more experienced agents with six months of service who did not use the AI assistant. Highly skilled workers, in this example at least, may earn less initially using AI tools because their recommendations are essentially tips and tricks they’ve already learned while working on the job. On the other hand, workers with lower or newer skills can use the tool to jump off some of those earlier steps and catch up quickly with their more experienced peers.
Previous studies have shown the ability of AI models to (barely) pass specialization Law And Medical licensing examsBut this search It represents the first of its kind to investigate the generative impact of artificial intelligence on a living workforce. The researchers say they chose to survey customer service agents because the industry has one of the highest rates of AI adoption to date.
“Our overall findings demonstrate that generative AI working alongside humans can have a significant positive impact on the productivity and retention of individual workers,” the researchers wrote.
ChatGPT levels the playing field
The 5,179 customer support agents participating in the survey were located predominantly in the Philippines, with a few others in the United States. They all work for an enterprise software company where they have to regularly rely on a combination of product expertise, problem-solving skills, and the ability to handle angry customers to complete their jobs. The best performing workers in the company according to the study, Usually come up with solutions twice As fast as ordinary workers before the introduction of artificial intelligence.
These differences are beginning to narrow Once the AI assistant gets involved, it’s partly because the AI model itself is trained on a dataset of successful customer service interactions. In other words, AI can synthesize successful conversations from the most productive employees and then use that to improve the performance of others. Top-performing workers may not have seen much benefit after using AI, but their experiences have carried over AI may help other workers catch up. This, in turn, can improve the company’s overall productivity.
“Artificial intelligence recommendations can be seen as expanding the marginal productivity of highly skilled workers by encoding their conversational patterns and disseminating them to other workers,” the study says. “In our environment, highly skilled workers are not compensated for these contributions.”
The researchers argue that the disparity in who benefits from AI may leave high-performing employees worse off than they were before the introduction of AI. Future organizations can Someday Paying these workers higher salaries, the researchers wrote, because their successful performance could be used by AI to increase the productivity of entire sectors of the company.
“Our findings raise questions about whether and how workers should be compensated for the data they provide to AI systems,” the study notes. “Highly skilled workers, in particular, play an important role in the development of the model but see smaller direct benefits in terms of improving their productivity.”
Although worried many analysts and experts and expect AI can It eliminates large segments of underperforming employees and even leads to wage reductionThe new research presents a slightly different reality. Here, the real losers for AI assistants in the corporate world are not new or underperforming employees, but their higher-ranking managers. These uncomfortable findings may not sit well with some in the managerial class who have been quick to advocate for more AI tools in the workplace in the name of efficiency.
Want to learn more about artificial intelligence, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligenceor browse our guides to The best free AI art generators And Everything we know about OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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