TY  - GEN
AU  - Ajzenman, Nicolás
AU  - Del Toro Mijares, Ana Teresa
AU  - Elacqua, Gregory
AU  - Hermosilla, Catalina
AU  - Veleda, Santiago Nicolas
TI  - Scaling Up Counseling with AI: Evidence from a Nationwide Experiment
PY  - 2026
Y1  - 2026/10/07
DO  - 10.18235/0014549
AB  - A central obstacle to scaling many interventions is implementer quality: as a program expands and the pool of implementers broadens, average quality falls. Conversation-based interventions (counseling, mentoring) are particularly sensitive to this constraint. LLMs offer a natural way out: personalized exchanges at zero marginal cost and uniform quality. We run a nationwide experiment in Chile (N42,000) designed to reduce teacher shortages by increasing applications to education majors. We compare an AI chatbot, Kai, with trained human counselors, both reaching high school seniors via WhatsApp. Among students with baseline interest in education (the interventions target), Kai significantly increases first-ranked education majors and the share of education majors in students choice sets; estimates in the human arm are smaller and not significant. Although the best human counselors are highly effective, Kai matches or outperforms roughly two- thirds of them. Its advantage lies in what we call “controlled variance”: it compresses the dispersion in quality observed across human implementers. Finally, text analysis reveals different interaction patterns across arms. Kai concentrates on factual content and scores higher on semantic coherence, while counselors score substantially higher on motivational and empathetic language.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.18235/0014549
ER  -