For the second year in a row, Xiang Hui, an associate professor of marketing, is the recipient of the Olin Award, which recognizes the impact that scholarly research by WashU Olin Business School faculty can have on business results. The annual award includes a $25,000 prize.
Hui’s winning paper offers empirical evidence about how an artificial intelligence (AI) copilot can effectively improve transaction outcomes in the real estate industry. The study shows that, when embedded in the workflow of frontline employees, AI assistance can help transactions move faster, improve customer experience and change how value is created and captured.
In the working paper, Hui, of Washington University in St. Louis, and co-authors Lin William Cong, at Nanyang Technological University, and Yushan Zhou, at Chinese University of Hong Kong, studied an AI copilot embedded in a nationwide real estate platform’s chat system in China. When working with buyers, the AI tool gives agents property recommendations and reply scripts. When working with sellers, it provides agents with pricing guidance and listing-title and description suggestions. Agents can use, edit or ignore the AI suggestions, and clients generally do not see the raw AI output.
Using both a field experiment and evidence from an 18-city rollout, the authors find that AI copilot access raised the probability of a listing selling within three months; shortened seller time-on-market and buyer search duration; raised transaction prices; and increased ratings from buyers and sellers after the sale.