Just leave us in the driver’s seat with AI, say worried workers

A new report finds workers keen to sit alongside AI, but want to retain control.

Artificial intelligence

Workers want AI to be in the “passenger seat” not the “driver’s seat” to assist them, not replace them, according to Zig Serafin, the CEO of the software company Qualtrics, which specialises in “experience management”.

“Applications and solutions that are designed to create a deeper connection with the work that someone is doing, making it easier, making it more simple, making it more delightful, will be the ones that will win out,” he says.

“We’re seeing AI being used to provide coaching, providing real time, in-the-moment feedback. As a result, you end up with a desire (by the employee) to have that assistant there to help.”

Serafin says that around the world and across different industries, the consistent theme from marketing officers and HR and people officers is how to use AI “to bring more humanity to the way they operate in their business, to be faster, more precise, more definitive in the actions that are being taken”.

If that sounds like a contradiction in terms – technology improving the human touch – Serafin argues that the power of AI is its ability to harness the data from call centres and emails and social media and use it to create a better connection between a customer and an organisation or an employee and an organisation.

With customers now interacting with an organisation across many different channels – from physical stores to online to apps to email to call centres – the need for more efficient and precise interactions has increased.

“At the core is better synthesising insights around what people’s emotional context might be, what their issues might be, where’s the friction in the way that a business is supporting a customer?” Serafin says.

“Where can employees do a better job in supporting a particular moment of need or maybe a moment of delight, understanding the preferences and the interests in order to better syndicate the right kind of content to someone, or to create a better piece of apparel or create a better service experience for a customer.”

He says AI gives companies the ability to quickly diagnose, capture the insights and drive the right actions through the organisation. It allows them to get ahead of a trend that might affect thousands of customers.

Qualtrics has a big data bank on employee engagement and behaviour across industries, countries and cultures and Serafin says it is now revealing rapid changes in workers’ motivations and engagement in a world of intense economic and political pressures and a changing workplace.

“It all comes back to common themes – what matters to employees is how well people listen to them, how well they connect with them, how they enable them to work in the way that allows them to be productive and engaged while also balancing the needs of the business,” Serafin says.

“The blending of work and life is ever so much greater … so that requires leaders to be more aware of what drives human behaviour, of what drives employees’ behaviour, what aligns them to the things they expect within the organisation they’re working for.

“Employee experience now matters more than ever because it affects the outcome of what the company produces. The relationship between the employee experience and the customer experience is more tightly interknit today than it ever has been. As a result, we’re finding CEOs are giving the chief people officers or the chief human resource officers the same strength and seat at the table, at the leadership meetings and the board level meetings, as the chief marketing officer or the chief financial officer

“.We’re finding this across the board. It’s elevating the importance because people are finding that this is a core business driver.

“What we’ve seen over the last two years is an inflection point at which the chief people officer is expected to bring in a point of view that actually drives business outcomes … It’s at a level where boards usually make it a topic of discussion on a quarterly basis to talk about how (the company) is doing with the employee experience, not just how many people we hired and how much are we paying them but how engaged are they and what are the factors affecting the outcomes of the business. It’s become a leading indicator for how one manages a business.

“As important as experience has been from a customer perspective at the board level, employee experience is becoming just as important.”

HELEN TRINCA