主题：AI Voicebot in Sales Call Automation

主讲：屈锗 副教授 复旦大学管理学院

时间：2021年4月8日18:30

地点：腾讯会议226114935

摘要：Empowered by artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots are surging as new technologies with both business potential and customer pushback. Via several field experiments, we find that undisclosed chatbots are as effective as proficient workers and four times more effective than inexperienced workers in engendering customer purchases in the automation of a structured sales call task. However, a disclosure of chatbot identity before the machine–customer conversation reduces purchase rates by more than 79.7%. Exploration of the mechanisms reveals that when customers know the conversational partner is not a human, they are curt and purchase less because they perceive the disclosed bot as less knowledgeable and less empathetic. While applying AI chatbots in human agent training, we find that the incremental benefit of the AI coach over human managers is heterogeneous across agents in an inverted-U shape: whereas middle-ranked agents improve their performance by the largest amount, both bottom- and top-ranked agents show limited incremental gains. This pattern is driven by a learning-based mechanism in which bottom-ranked agents encounter the most severe information overload problem with the AI versus human coach, while top-ranked agents hold the strongest aversion to the AI relative to a human coach. Such challenges can be alleviated by restricting the training feedback level and through a AI–human coach assemblage, which harness the hard data skills of the AI coach and soft interpersonal skills of human managers.

讲座人简介：屈锗，复旦大学管理学院副教授，美国麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院访问学者，入选上海市浦江人才计划。毕业于美国佐治亚理工学院，获信息技术管理博士学位。主要从个人、组织以及管理层面研究新兴技术的应用以及对个人及组织的影响，已在MIS Quarterly, Marketing Science等国际期刊上发表论文十余篇，研究得到了国家自然科学基金项目以及上海市哲学社会科学规划的资助。获得2011管理理论与实务国际研讨会优良论文奖，以及2011 KMIS & Conf-IRM International Conference的最佳论文奖，并入围2020年INFORMS营销科学协会Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI-EMAC 实践奖的决赛。