AI tools raise productivity and can also act as great equalizers

They can close organizational or societal skill gaps. But does everyone becoming an expert mean nobody will be an expert?

- NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA

A company selling its wares to a wide variety of customers decides to introduce its customer-support staff to a new support tool based on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The employees manning the phone lines or responding to customer complaints over computers now have a new type of assistant to help them in their jobs.

The productivity of these employees is measured by how many complaints get resolved in an hour. The GenAI tool helped increase employee productivity through three effects: a reduction in the time an employee now spends on each customer query, an increase in the number of chats an employee handles every hour, and a higher success rate of cases that are resolved to the satisfaction of callers.

Customers also tend to be more satisfied by their experience during the call or chat, which is especially important, since the ones reaching out are usually doing so because they are dissatisfied with the product they have paid money to buy. Less stress from irate customers also reduces attrition in the company's workforce.

However, the most interesting result of this study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, based on their observations of 5,179 customer-support agents at work, has to do with the skills gap in the unit they put under their research microscope. The three economists found that while the overall productivity of the team increased, most of that improvement was among team members who were either less skilled at their jobs or less experienced.