What Stanford & MIT Learned When Support Teams Used AI

One of the largest real-world studies of AI at work looked at customer support — and the results are hard to ignore for any business fielding the same questions all day.

Most debates about AI are theoretical. This one wasn't. Economists measured what actually happened when thousands of real support agents were given an AI assistant — and tracked their output for months.

The study

In "Generative AI at Work" (published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023), economists Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford), Danielle Li (MIT) and Lindsey Raymond studied more than 5,000 customer-support agents given access to an AI conversational assistant.

On average, agents resolved 14% more issues per hour. But the effect wasn't evenly spread: newer and lower-skilled agents improved by 34%, while the most experienced agents saw little change. In effect, the AI spread the know-how of the best agents to everyone else — and customers reported more positive interactions too.

Why it works

Most support volume is repetitive — the same questions about hours, pricing, refunds, availability, and how-tos, asked over and over. AI is exceptional at exactly that: instant, consistent, on-brand answers to the 80% of tickets that don't need a human. That frees people to spend their time only on the genuinely hard cases.

From "more productive agents" to "no queue at all"

Launchzy's AI Customer Support takes the finding one step further. Instead of assisting a human agent, it answers customers directly across website chat, email, and tickets — resolving the repetitive questions 24/7 and escalating only what genuinely needs a person. You get the same research-backed leverage the study describes, without hiring or training a bigger team.

The study's real lesson isn't "AI replaces support." It's that AI removes the repetitive load so your customers get instant answers and your team gets its time back.