Artificial intelligence can improve sales by four times compared to some human employees

CATONSVILLE, MD, September 23, 2019 - Chatbots, which use artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation through voice commands or text chats, incur almost zero marginal costs and can outsell some human employees by four times, so why aren't they used more often? According to new research, the main contributor is customer pushback. The machines don't have "bad days" and never get frustrated or tired like humans, and they can save money for consumers, but new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science says if customers know about the chatbot before purchasing, sales rates decline by more than 79.7%. The study authors, Xueming Luo and Siliang Tong (both of Temple University), Zheng Fang of Sichuan University, and Zhe Qu of Fudan University, targeted 6,000 customers from a financial services company. They were randomly assigned to either humans or chatbots, and disclosure of the bots varied from not telling the consumer at all, to telling them at the beginning of the conversation or after the conversation, or telling them after they'd purchased something.