Generative AI at Work

We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant for 5,172 customer-support agents. Access to AI assistance increases worker productivity, measured by issues resolved per hour, by 15% on average, with substantial heterogeneity. Less experienced and lower-skilled workers improve in both speed and quality, while the most experienced and highest-skilled workers see small gains in speed and small declines in quality. We also find that AI assistance facilitates worker learning and improves English fluency, particularly among international agents. Gains from AI adoption are largest for moderately rare problems, where human agents have less baseline experience but the system still has adequate training data. AI assistance improves the experience of work: customers are more polite and less likely to ask to speak to a manager.