AI can be trusted with HR data, says Culture Amp which has teamed up with Google

Culture Amp says its use of AI through a partnership with tech giant Google is rigorous and ethical, and won’t endanger employee data.

Culture Amp co-founder Doug English is comfortable that AI won’t compromise HR data.

Should generative AI be trusted with sensitive HR information? The answer is yes, according to Melbourne-based unicorn scale-up Culture Amp.

Culture Amp says its use of Google’s AI platform is rigorous, ethical and won’t endanger its customers or their employees’ data.

Culture Amp is deploying Google’s Vertex AI capabilities, following what co-founder Doug English said was a successful pilot program that should save HR professionals hundreds of hours normally spent analysing employee feedback.

The software company, which was most recently valued at $2bn in a 2021 $US100m funding round, offers an employee engagement platform, including pulse surveys and analysis of employee feedback, which will now be underpinned by generative AI from Google Vertex.

Mr English said the first of Culture Amp’s generative AI capabilities would include features that summarise thousands of employee survey comments into topics and actionable insights, automating a process he said could typically takes HR administrators of larger organisations hundreds of hours to complete.

“The most important thing for us is how we protect the data,” Mr English said.

“As an employee experience platform our customers are giving us pretty sensitive data, so first and foremost it’s about how do we protect that while working within an environment that gives us some flexibility to do what we need to do.

“The thing that was most appealing about working with Google is the experience they have in terms of consistently ethical considerations of AI, but also the platform and capabilities that they have provided.

Google has released its AI technology. Picture: Denis Charlet/AFP

“We can train our own models over the top of their models, in an environment that is a Culture Amp secure account.

“That level of control of being able to choose where and how we invest, and keep the data safe, was definitely a pretty important selling point for us.”

The government has called for ideas about how Australia could develop safe and responsible AI practices, as concerns grow about the potential harms associated with the nascent technology.

Google has called for a shake-up of Australia’s Copyright Act to make it easier for companies to train their AI data sets based on copyrighted content.

Mr English said the Google partnership had been a multi-year journey for Culture Amp, which he said has been adding engineers with AI experience over the past couple of years.

“You can’t take a short-term, opportunistic approach to this technology … You need a rigorous operating model and ethical principles to create value in a way that doesn’t endanger your customers or their employees’ wellbeing,” he said.

“AI is intrinsically tied to good data governance; I know that’s less sexy but it’s important.

“And we definitely see AI and then even more specifically generative AI as really just one tool in the toolbox. We want to be very careful about where and how we use it.

“You might have 200,000 comments from an employee survey for teams to read and comprehend and try and make sense of, and HR teams will either read every comment, or try and summarise in their head.

“For generative AI to try to identify those emerging themes and summarise them is about saving HR teams some time, making their jobs easier and taking the drudgery out the work.”

Culture Amp in April joined the deepening ‘tech wreck’ and laid off 9 per cent of its staff – or about 90 employees – in what its chief executive, Didier Elzinga, described as an extremely difficult call.

“We’re progressing well overall, I think,” Mr English said. “ I think we are lucky to be in a space where companies will always need to be looking after their employees and especially through hard times like this. Things like performance management have become more critical within organisations.

“We’re just focused on building out the platform and creating as much value for our customers as possible.”