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.
Another takeaway for managers: the gains are larger for less-experienced and lower-performing sales representatives. The findings suggest that AI can help narrow gaps in task-specific expertise by supporting recommendation, communication, pricing and listing-related tasks inside existing workflows.
“Much of the conversation around AI in business focuses on whether it can make individual workers more productive. Our study looks at a broader question: When AI supports a frontline intermediary, can it change how an entire transaction works — including search, pricing, speed and customer experience on both sides of the market?” Hui said.
“The evidence suggests that AI can create value when it is embedded directly into existing workflows as decision support,” Hui said. “In this setting, the copilot did not replace agents; it helped them with measurable tasks such as recommendations, communication, pricing guidance and listing text, while agents remained responsible for client-facing decisions.”
Hui said the study’s core findings — namely the reduced search friction, higher match quality, improved customer experience, and the “leveling” effect for newer agents — may be relevant to a variety of sales, advisory and retail businesses in the U.S. The results are especially applicable in businesses where frontline workers help customers navigate complex choices and where AI can support measurable tasks while humans remain responsible for final decisions.
Richard Mahoney, Olin’s distinguished executive in residence and former chairman and CEO of Monsanto, initiated and funds the Olin Award, which is now in its 19th year.
Reaffirming schoolwide commitment to AI excellence
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses that quickly identify opportunities created by AI and harness its full potential can gain a competitive edge. WashU Olin researchers have been at the forefront of this trend, with practical research that highlights how businesses can use AI to improve productivity, decision-making and customer outcomes across industries.
In fact, eight of the last 10 Olin Awards have recognized research advancing AI and machine learning or used AI to drive the research itself.
Recently, an anonymous donor made a $300,000 pledge to create the Olin AI Research Excellence Fund, which will provide resources for faculty exploring and pushing the boundaries of AI in business.
“Olin Business School is making a broad, schoolwide commitment to AI research that advances both rigorous scholarship and real-world practice,” said Dan Elfenbein, vice dean for research and a professor of organization and strategy at WashU Olin.
“From a research perspective, this commitment builds on, and leverages, more than a decade of experience and dozens of published studies by our faculty that examine machine learning, e-commerce platforms and AI itself. We have been focused on the ways that technology shapes markets and commerce for a long time. The AI commitment is a natural extension of this prior work and builds on the foundation of capabilities that this work generated.”
Olin faculty also are developing new AI models and data tools that advance research. Armed with such tools, researchers can better study topics such as how people respond to news, why certain songs or ideas become “hits” and how AI can amplify — or reduce — bias in decision-making. They also are studying how AI changes pricing, trust and inequality — and pushing the boundaries of business research, Elfenbein said.
“Just as importantly, that frontier work is feeding directly into the classroom,” he said. “We’re equipping students to lead in an AI-shaped economy with the analytical tools, critical judgment and ethical grounding to deploy these technologies responsibly and effectively.”
