Artificial Intelligence Coaches for Sales Agents: Caveats and Solutions. (March 2021)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Artificial Intelligence Coaches for Sales Agents: Caveats and Solutions. (March 2021)
- Main Title:
- Artificial Intelligence Coaches for Sales Agents: Caveats and Solutions
- Authors:
- Luo, Xueming
Qin, Marco Shaojun
Fang, Zheng
Qu, Zhe - Abstract:
- Firms are exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) coaches to provide training to sales agents and improve their job skills. The authors present several caveats associated with such practices based on a series of randomized field experiments. Experiment 1 shows 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. To alleviate the challenge faced by bottom-ranked agents, Experiment 2 redesigns the AI coach by restricting the training feedback level and shows a significant improvement in agent performance. Experiment 3 reveals that the AI–human coach assemblage outperforms either the AI or human coach alone. This assemblage can harness the hard data skills of the AI coach and soft interpersonal skills of human managers, solving both problems faced by bottom- and top-ranked agents. These findings offer novel insights into AI coaches for researchers and managers alike.
- Is Part Of:
- Journal of marketing. Volume 85:Number 2(2021)
- Journal:
- Journal of marketing
- Issue:
- Volume 85:Number 2(2021)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 85, Issue 2 (2021)
- Year:
- 2021
- Volume:
- 85
- Issue:
- 2
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2021-0085-0002-0000
- Page Start:
- 14
- Page End:
- 32
- Publication Date:
- 2021-03
- Subjects:
- AI coach -- artificial intelligence -- aversion -- information overload -- new technology -- sales training -- sales force management
Marketing -- Periodicals
Marketing -- Management -- Periodicals
658.8005 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.sagepublications.com/ ↗
https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jmx ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1177/0022242920956676 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0022-2429
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 14900.xml