Prof. K. Sudhir Wins American Marketing Association Award for Research on AI Hiring Practices
In a 2024 paper published in the journal Marketing Science, Sudhir and three collaborators found that AI can effectively identify good candidates for sales roles while reducing recruiting costs for businesses.
K. Sudhir, the James L. Frank ’32 Professor of Private Enterprise and Management at Yale SOM, has won the 2024 Best Paper in AI and Marketing award from the AI Special Interest Group within the American Marketing Association (AMA) for his paper, “Can AI and AI-Hybrids Detect Persuasion Skills? Salesforce Hiring with Conversational Video Interviews.”
The award recognizes outstanding research on marketing and the evolving field of AI. Sudhir co-authored the paper, which appeared in the journal Marketing Science, with Ishita Chakraborty PhD ’21, a professor of marketing at Wisconsin Business School; Khai Chiong, visiting assistant professor at SOM; and Howard Dover, director of the Center for Professional Sales at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The four researchers created an AI model to analyze video job interviews and identify candidates for sales roles. The paper explains how the model examines factors such as body language, the spoken content of an interview, and candidates’ politeness and optimism in order to determine their sales ability. Sudhir and his coresearchers found that the AI model, used on its own, improved workforce quality by about 40%. When a human worked with the AI to evaluate candidates, the workforce improvement jumped to about 60%.
Sudhir joined SOM’s faculty in 2001 after earning a PhD at Cornell University. A pioneer in the use of structural empirical methods in marketing, he studies customer relationship management and digital marketing. Most recently, he has focused his research agenda on AI. He served as the editor-in-chief of Marketing Science from 2016 to 2021.
