According to a recent survey, 52% of employees feel “worried” about AI’s impact on the workplace. Though various estimates place enterprise adoption of generative AI tools at upwards of 90%, PWC found that only 11% of surveyed organizations had achieved complete and responsible AI implementation.
These statistics demonstrate that employees are nervous about AI in the digital workplace. Nobody wants to get replaced. This worry can be addressed by correctly implementing AI. In fact, with the right approach, AI can build stronger, more connected teams. How? In a word: empathy.
Empathy offers a competitive edge in today’s business environment, not just a moral benefit. EY Consulting research indicates a strong connection between empathy and positive workplace outcomes. According to a recent report, 87% of employees perceive empathy as a key driver of better leadership, which, in turn, is linked to significant increases in efficiency, creativity, job satisfaction, and innovation.
Empathy should be a guiding principle when integrating AI into the Digital Workplace. But what does that mean exactly? How can empathy, a uniquely human trait, guide unfeeling machine learning tools? In this post, we will explore those questions further and elaborate on how Pomeroy meets the challenge of building empathy into AI.
What is human-centered AI?
Empathy is foregrounded in human-centered AI (HCAI), an emerging discipline that strives to ensure technology serves human needs, not vice versa. HCAI uses “artificial empathy,” which predicts how users might react in various situations based on emotional flags they display in an interaction, such as a chat or voice call.
Taking it a step further, human-centered AI meets users (customers and employees) where they are by embedding in their preferred channels (Slack, MS Teams, etc.). For example, predictive analytics can (and should) anticipate the user’s needs and even preemptively remediate them before the user actively asks for help.
Let’s say an employee at your organization finds their laptop not working. Typically, this employee would need to call or log into the Service Desk, potentially interacting with a chatbot or a person, and do a lot of explaining and waiting to get their laptop fixed. In the empathetic, human-centered model, a connected support AI would detect an issue with the user’s laptop and alert the Service Desk. In this case, the Service Desk reaches out before the user can file a ticket or even supplies the user with a replacement laptop while fixing the problem. This is what the terms “zero-touch IT” or “invisible service desk” mean, not that IT or the Service Desk are going away, just that they will get much better at anticipating user needs.
However, there is more to human-centered AI than simply telling an AI tool to “have empathy.” There is a set of guiding principles that steer AI systems toward this goal, including:
- Understanding user needs
- Ethical design and bias reduction
- Incorporating user feedback
- Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity
- Transparency and explainability in systems
- Iterative improvement through continuous feedback
- Human oversight
Key elements of human-centered AI implementation
Several key considerations are crucial for realizing truly effective human-centered AI, including:
- Augmentation: Ensuring AI augments, rather than replaces, human efforts is vital.
- Ethical application: Guarding against the manipulative use of AI and emotional data is paramount to maintaining and building trust, a core objective of empathetic AI.
- Bias mitigation: Addressing potential biases in training data is essential to prevent misinterpretations across various contexts.
- Data security: Prioritizing the protection of sensitive emotional data is critical to navigate ethical and legal concerns effectively.
- ROI assessment: It is important to develop strategies to assess the value and impact of empathy, acknowledging that its intangible benefits may be challenging to measure using traditional metrics.
Examples and use cases
Eventually, artificial empathy will be a part of almost every AI system. For now, enterprises are seeing the most returns in a few applications:
- Customer service: HCAI systems understand and respond to human emotions, creating a more empathetic and personalized experience. Which in turn boosts customer satisfaction scores.
- Employee experience: AI-powered tools analyze employee sentiment and provide personalized support, improving morale and productivity.
- Training and development: Adaptive learning platforms use AI to tailor training content to individual employee needs and learning styles.
- HR and talent acquisition: AI assists in identifying and engaging with potential candidates while supporting employee onboarding and development.
- Collaboration and communication: Intelligent platforms facilitate more effective teamwork by understanding communication patterns and suggesting relevant resources or connections.
- Accessibility: AI-driven features enhance the accessibility of digital tools for employees with disabilities, promoting inclusivity.
These examples illustrate how prioritizing user needs through human-centered AI enhances experiences and outcomes across industries.
How is Pomeroy incorporating human-centered AI into our offerings?
Pomeroy is leading the way in providing human-centric and AI-enabled workplace experiences with a focus on:
- Empathy with personalization: We leverage AI to analyze user behavior to deliver personalized services that resonate with their needs. Instead of bringing humans to the technology, our technology solutions meet the users where they work, fostering empathy.
- Automation with contextualization: With our technology solutions, we understand user context to provide tailored services. We leverage AI to understand workflows and technology usage to provide more automated solutions with minimal human touch.
- Productivity enhancement with proactive support: Pomeroy leverages AI-driven support that detects issues before users report them. This proactive support ensures uninterrupted productivity enhancements.
- Unified experience with intelligent orchestration: Pomeroy provides an intelligent orchestration of insights from the individual AI agents from the diverse enterprise technology ecosystem, providing a consolidated approach to enhance human experience with the workplace.
- Ethical AI usage with security: Pomeroy also enables the data privacy and transparency mechanisms to ensure that employees see what data is collected by AI and why and how it is used. Our zero-trust access models leverage adaptive authentication and threat detection without compromising user experience.
At Pomeroy, we incorporate an AI-enabled and human experience-centric digital workplace vision that ensures continuous learning and improvement with changing human behavior and business needs, and a robust governance framework that includes regular audits to maintain transparency, accountability, and ethical AI use.
Curating the future of AI
Empathy builds trust in the Digital Workplace, leading to increased tool adoption. It is an X factor that boosts productivity, improves employee satisfaction by making work easier and more aligned with individual styles, and fosters greater engagement. Ultimately, a human-centered Digital Workplace drives innovation by empowering employees to experiment and contribute creatively when they feel understood and supported by their digital tools.
Get in touch to learn more about how we can help implement and optimize AI in your environment.
