How to Make AI Work for You, at Work

Brynjolfsson, along with researchers Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, authored a study in which generative AI was used by over 5,000 customer support agents at a call center, and found that AI tools boosted workers productivity, reduced attrition, and were especially helpful for early-career workers. Through machine learning, the generative AI systems were able to use pattern recognition to identify successes and failures in customer service approaches. "It listened in on a whole bunch of transcripts and calls, and could see the patterns that turned out well the ones that didn't turn out well," says Brynjolfsson. "It captured that tacit knowledge and passed it on to the less experienced workers." Brynjolfsson said the AI system was able to recommend specific features to solve a customer's problems, or a tone of voice or phrasing that might work better. "Maybe no human had ever written down those rules before but the AI system, by looking at literally millions of transcripts, was able to pick up on these patterns." AI tools are likely going to impact tasks that are "routine, predictable, or standardized," according to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology and author of I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. Though it might be tempting to brush off the sudden rise of AI tools as just a fad, Chamorro-Premuzic says it's important to become as familiar as possible with the tools, as they are likely to become ubiquitous. "These are tools that everybody will use, and if you're the only person not even trying it out or not using it, you might actually suffer," he says, comparing such resistance to deciding not to use Google's search engine.