Eleanor Wiske Dillon

Eleanor Wiske Dillon, Sonia Jaffe, Nicole Immorlica et al.

We present evidence from a field experiment across 66 firms and 7,137 knowledge workers. Workers were randomly selected to access a generative AI tool integrated into applications they already used at work for email, meetings, and writing. In the second half of the 6-month experiment, the 80% of treated workers who used this tool spent two fewer hours on email each week and reduced their time working outside of regular hours. Apart from these individual time savings, we do not detect shifts in the quantity or composition of workers' tasks resulting from individual-level AI provision.

Eleanor Wiske Dillon, Sonia Jaffe, Sida Peng et al.

Advances in generative AI have rapidly expanded the potential of computers to perform or assist in a wide array of tasks traditionally performed by humans. We analyze a large, real-world randomized experiment of over 6,000 workers at 56 firms to present some of the earliest evidence on how these technologies are changing the way knowledge workers do their jobs. We find substantial time savings on common core tasks across a wide range of industries and occupations: workers who make use of this technology spent half an hour less reading email each week and completed documents 12% faster. Despite the newness of the technology, nearly 40% of workers who were given access to the tool used it regularly in their work throughout the 6-month study.