WORK
Generative AI at Work (2023)
Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond's landmark 2023 study of 5,179 customer-service agents using a generative AI assistant — the first rigorous empirical evidence that AI compresses skill gaps by helping the least-skilled workers the most.
The 2023 NBER working paper Generative AI at Work, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, provided some of the first rigorous empirical evidence about how generative AI affects worker productivity. Studying the staggered rollout of a generative AI conversational assistant to 5,179 customer support agents at a large software company, the authors found that access to the tool increased productivity (measured in issues resolved per hour) by 14 percent on average. The gains were radically uneven across the skill distribution: novice and low-skilled workers improved by 34 percent, while experienced and highly skilled workers saw minimal impact. The finding suggested the AI was effectively capturing and disseminating the tacit knowledge of the best workers — helping newer employees move down the experience curve faster. If the pattern generalized, AI could compress skill inequality rather than widen it, though subsequent evidence on junior hiring declines complicated the optimistic interpretation.
