When Better Opportunities Backfire: Service Worker Responses to Parallel AI Deployment in Customer Acquisition

Abstract

As AI voice agents get deployed in high-volume contact centers, firms can route low-intent leads to AI and allocate high-intent leads to human workers. Drawing on sequential search theory, we posit that AI-induced task allocation reshapes work, enriching opportunities facing human workers but also raising their reservation value for continuing with the lead in hand, making them less willing to persist. We study the effects of an AI voice-agent deployment at a Chinese online health-insurance brokerage using more than a half million customer outreach records surrounding the rollout. Adopting a regression-discontinuity-in-time design, we trace how worker behavior changes across the workday. Results show that the enrichment of human-facing opportunities concentrates early in the workday, raising the probability that a call is a high-intent lead by about 23 percentage points on the first three calls and fading to zero later. However, customer acquisition by human workers declines precisely where the enrichment is greatest, falling about 5 percentage points on the first three calls and flattening over the day. Consistent with the theorized reservation value mechanism, workers reallocate their earliest leads about 8 percentage points more often and persist less with them, shortening those calls by about 13%. A calibrated decomposition analysis further shows that the modest gain from improved lead ordering is outweighed by a much larger negative behavioral response. By reshaping the quality and within-workday distribution of opportunities, parallel AI deployment alters how workers pursue tasks, highlighting opportunity distribution as an important service operations state variable beyond workload and congestion.