Generative AI at Work
- Economics of transformative ai
- Working Paper
We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,172 customer support agents. Access to AI assistance increases worker productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 15% on average, with substantial heterogeneity across workers. Less experienced and lower-skilled workers improve both the speed and quality of their output while the most experienced and highest-skilled workers see small gains in speed and small declines in quality.
We also find evidence that AI assistance facilitates worker learning and improves English fluency, particularly among international agents. While AI systems improve with more training data, we find that the gains from AI adoption are largest for relatively rare problems, where human agents have less baseline training and experience. Finally, we provide evidence that AI assistance improves the experience of work along two key dimensions: customers are more polite and less likely to ask to speak to a manager.
Authors
Erik Brynjolfsson
Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor
Erik Brynjolfsson is one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of technology and artificial intelligence. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He also is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor by Courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
One of the most-cited authors on the economics of information, Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles.
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Danielle Li
Associate Professor in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management
Lindsey Raymond
Digital Fellow
Lindsey Raymond is a postdoctoral researcher in the Economics and Computation Group at Microsoft Research. In 2026, she will join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor, with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics, EECS, and the Schwarzman College of Computing. Her research examines how new technologies shape labor markets and market competition, and how insights from economics can inform algorithm design. She received her PhD in Economics from MIT and her BA from Yale University, where she was the President Gerald Ford Scholar-Athlete, and served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2021 to 2022.
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