Services
Highlights
- Through its novel ability to create new output that summarizes, contextualizes, and generates intuitive, human-like content, GenAI presents new opportunities for employees to enhance their own creativity and productivity.
- Innovative GenAI use cases show how GenAI enables and empowers employees to intuitively understand what they need and personalizes information for them.
- We focus on the revolutionary way GenAI will reshape the 3Ps—productivity, emPowerment, and purpose—of employee engagement.
In this article
In this articleinpage
GenAI for employee experience
Generative AI (GenAI) is the new panacea for companies to revitalize the 3Ps of employee experience.
Employees are increasingly demanding personalized experiences. Just like with so many products and services they use in their daily life, at work also, they are looking for solutions that offer intuitive recommendations and guided learnings. GenAI can be a key differentiator in improving efficiency, productivity, and engagement of the workforce. With its intuitiveness, contextualization, and hyper-personalization abilities, the technology can foster the 3Ps of employee experience—productivity, emPowerment, and purpose. And HR departments are quickly catching up on this.
GenAI challenges for HR
GenAI employee experience initiatives will be the agenda for HR departments over the next few years.
While fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) will enable the technology infrastructure, the challenge will be building human capabilities within HR teams to bring out the best in AI models. GenAI literacy and a curiosity-driven culture within HR teams will be critical to the success of employee experience programs.
GenAI output may encounter errors, hallucinations, or catastrophic forgetting as the first-generation models are perfected. If left unaddressed, such deviations from desired outputs could have an adverse impact on employee trust and experience. This presents an intriguing challenge that requires vigilant monitoring of both data quality and quantity by the HR team. For example, GenAI-enabled employee profile summaries and performance data can be leveraged to make important decisions on manpower planning, recruitment, promotions, and other HR management concerns. However, in the absence of thorough anomaly detection methods and governance, the generated output may contain errors or hallucinations. This could be due to sampling bias because of underrepresentation of certain skills or groups, training on inadequate or biased data points, data imputation, or various other issues.
Another challenge is the persisting fear that GenAI may replace jobs and displace workers, potentially leading to resistance from employees and HR functions to adopting GenAI. This can create a negative feedback loop that organizations must manage over time. Overcoming the challenge will require the right communication with employees.
Building GenAI capabilities
HR organizations can get a head start by building capabilities for deep contextualization, synergy with next-gen technology, and human-AI collaboration.
The future value of GenAI is in specifics and goes beyond generalization. Getting true value from LLM models requires new skills in deep contextualization. GenAI models are amazing for general purpose usage, but organizations can drive real value when they fully contextualize solutions to create, for instance, company policies, organizational communication, press releases and marketing materials, and management reports. This will require bringing together organizational, domain, and universal knowledge.
Next, organizations need to build new synergies with next-gen technologies. The collaborative interaction of discriminative AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and LLMs can maximize the output of GenAI use cases. Predictive AI can be used to forecast suitable job openings based on roles and experience, and automatically track the progress of an application. This can include scheduling interviews and providing status updates. GenAI excels in generating tailored content to help employees learn and prepare effectively for internal interviews. Constructive interaction and synergy among these technologies can lead to comprehensive workplace solutions that will meet employee aspirations.
GenAI architecture for HR
The 3Ps of employee experience influenced by GenAI require a new architecture and roadmap for HR teams.
GenAI will deliver maximum value when collaborating with the most empathetic human minds and human-centered design experts. Human creativity will be critical to building connections and bringing cross-disciplinary output, as also in ensuring responsibility and governance at each stage of GenAI output creation.
Figure 1: Value drivers during GenAI implementation
An infographic that describes the three value drivers to achieve the right GenAI implementation
Employee experience architecture will undergo a massive change along with the introduction of a new GenAI layer. Enterprise data architecture within the HR organization will feed the GenAI architecture and enable LLM models to create an elevated output for employee experience. Here, GenAI will leverage enterprise strategy, technology, multi-nodal data points, talent information, people skills, and processes to create original content impacting empowerment, productivity, and employees’ sense of purpose.
Figure 2: GenAI-influenced employee experience architecture
An infographic depicting a GenAI-influenced employee experience architecture
Use cases
Successful GenAI programs are already in action at forward-looking organizations.
Some of these are:
Use case one: In-context support for newly onboarded employees
GenAI has tremendous potential to transform the performance of newly onboarded employees. Let’s take the case of a recently joined procurement analyst tasked with supplier evaluation, contract negotiation, and monthly supply cost reporting. While the analyst can handle general tasks on her own, navigating exceptional scenarios will require contextual understanding. For example, when faced with an expired vendor contract, a new employee may struggle to navigate through the organization's hierarchy to seek information on the contract.
GenAI can leverage well-trained LLMs to intuitively intervene in company resources and explore extensive domain knowledge, such as terms that need to be considered, whether there should be an extension, or any pricing negotiation clauses. GenAI can connect the current requirements to past actions in the company's data network and provide the required summary of information on extension or renewal of a contract as desired by the analyst. This acts as a starting point for her to put up a case with the right stakeholders.
In this use case, GenAI will not only empower the employee with domain knowledge and digestible summaries, but also make her productive from day one.
Use case two: Bridging the gap between employee readiness and purposeful career opportunities
Traditional learning trajectories designed to support internal career mobility might no longer offer genuine insights into the emerging career landscape that employees may see in the next five years. So far, AI has been able to calibrate and make predictions through the conventional summary of job descriptions, resumes, or skills, resulting in a successful match. However, it can go beyond identifying skills gaps and learning journeys, and can coach employees and prepare them for interviews.
Often, internal job positions go unfilled not due to lack of capabilities, but because candidates struggle for the right guidance. GenAI can provide timely advice, big picture insights into a role, job expectations, behavior skills required, and a readiness plan based on previous successes. It can even contextualize interview questions based on an interviewee’s profile and past background. Based on the content from internal and external nodal points, it can serve as an interview assistant, helping candidates model interviews and prepare using simulations. This use case helps aspiring employees identify opportunities for career growth and empowers them with all the information to tap those opportunities, in a few prompts.
Use case three: Injecting consciousness into employee appraisals and feedback
GenAI can enrich the feedback process by addressing human bias due to the recency effect. For employee interactions or surveys, GenAI can provide a neutral summary of all interactions and events over a specific period. For an annual IT survey, for example, an LLM can summarize an employee's interactions with the IT department, highlighting the department’s performance against a service. This unbiased layer of information aids the function in responding to the survey.
A comparable scenario can be drawn during performance assessments. LLMs can mitigate biases, common in human nature, by generating performance summaries linked to multimodal data points. For example, it can be used to counter the tendency to overemphasize projects shifting from red to green, acknowledging the proactive problem-solving of consistently green projects. GenAI can empower managers with contextualized and information-synthesized performance feedback summaries, reducing cognitive bias.
All of these use cases elevate consciousness, making employees feel empowered and productive, thereby serving the true purpose of feedback and evaluations.
A GenAI framework for HR
Prioritizing which HR use cases to pursue in a rapidly evolving technology landscape requires the right framework and choices.
We recommend a framework that analyzes use cases and prioritizes them based on the impact on employee experience and ease of implementation. The figure below provides a sample of 10 indicative HR use cases. Enterprises choose the right GenAI use case for enhanced experience and return on investment.
Figure 3: A priority framework for GenAI use cases impacting employee experience
An infographic presenting a prioritization framework that impacts employee experience
The way forward
GenAI will reshape how organizations assist their customers, engage with employees, and manage their work processes.
The GenAI disruption is clearly driving major investments in the HR and customer engagement areas, and this investment is merely the beginning of what lies ahead.
GenAI can bridge the distance with employees and make the relationship between employers and employees increasingly non-transactional. By taking care of routine tasks, it can free up HR business partners’ time for more meaningful employee connects. Unlike conventional AI, GenAI applications can add an emotional angle to employee engagement and enable HR departments to make empathy-based decisions.
It is evident that enterprises that can utilize GenAI in a planned, cost-effective, and ethical manner will gain a strategic, competitive edge. As a first step, HR must start with a GenAI fitment assessment of their HR-IT ecosystem and arrive at use cases for elevating the 3Ps of employee experience. The assessment should involve deep-dive discovery across personas, processes, and current technology landscape, thereby identifying employee journeys and user stories that can be transformed with GenAI.
