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AI made the most money where companies were doing nothing at all

Oct 8
3 min read

Updated: Oct 10

Public-domain art plate: Audubon — Baltimore Oriole, Birds of America (1827-1838)
Baltimore Oriole, a plate from John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827-1838).

AI made the most money where the company had been offering customers nothing at all.


The study. A leading cross-border e-commerce platform ran seven randomized field experiments between September 2023 and June 2024, adding generative AI to seven different parts of the business, from a pre-sale chatbot to product pages to Google ads. Samples ranged from about 30,000 to 13.7 million people or products.


The finding. The sales effects ranged from nothing to +16.3%. The big winner was a 24/7 AI chatbot answering pre-purchase questions that previously got an automatic "no service available" reply: sales +16.3%, conversion +21.7%. AI-improved search added 2.9% and AI-written product descriptions 2.1%. AI-rewritten Google ad titles did worse than the human ones (−4.5%, not statistically significant).

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