Employee Experience, Empowered By AI

Over 50% of participating Filipino workers express favorable opinions toward using AI as an assistive device at work, according to this year’s Qualtrics Employee Experience Trends Report. That’s greater than the global average—which shows less than half of global respondents expressing the same willingness—making the Philippines a prime candidate for exploring ways AI can update, uplift, and upgrade the employee experience. 

Before discussing how to use AI to take the employee experience to the next level, it’s worth noting that local workers tend to have specific preferences beyond AI versus no AI. In particular, the same trends report revealed that workers are more comfortable with AI when it serves as an assistive device rather than a high-stakes decision-maker. The human worker’s sense of control is essential to collaborating.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to integrate AI with the workforce? How can we best weave AI into the working lives of Filipino personnel, who have already voiced a readiness to take the next step?

Although the latest hype is all about AI capability, digital skills, and organizational management, recent findings have highlighted the essential nature of other human capabilities when successfully implementing AI.

Notably, there’s a focus on the human ability to understand and use context – one of AI’s greatest weaknesses. While this might seem like a given, the truth is that this essential trait is often overlooked in favor of more obviously new and relevant skills like digital literacy. As of late, technical skills get a lot more attention than anything else, and it shows that most companies focus solely on training technical skills, leaving the rest to the wayside in the hope that it all comes naturally later. 

The result of this short-sighted methodology is that employees need more vital skills, and employers find that an increasingly large gap is developing between what leaders consider important skills and values and what employees learn.

Employees can make the most of this new technology through a strong sense of context. With AI as a co-pilot, employees can breeze through simple tasks and come fully prepared for more significant challenges – but another critical skill comes into play here: domain expertise. Although the power of context allows employees to make sense of the situation, while AI provides support, employees also need domain expertise over their line of work or industry and AI and its integration into their job or risk getting lost along the way.

This is because AI is very good at pulling up information and providing possible answers; it might be too good. As useful as it might be, the truth is that AI can end up presenting so much information that it ends up as nonsense babble; it can be challenging to discern what is factual and relevant and what the AI automatically presents as fact – despite it being otherwise. Employees need to understand the tool they’re using to effectively sift through the static and turn that output into solid results.

Ultimately, the answer is simple: it should be the Employee Experience, Empowered by AI – not the other way around.