Now more than 20 years into her HR career, Brooke Shreeve says she has become an evangelist for chatbots, partly because of her survival instincts.
"I have to stay up on what's new; if I don't I'll get replaced by somebody who will," says Shreeve, chief people officer at Weave, a healthcare payments software company. "I need to make sure I'm embracing new technology."
Shreeve and other benefit leaders are quickly adopting the
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Last year, Shreeve helped implement a new AI tool for analyzing the company's annual employee experience survey of its 850 employees. In prior years, her team would read through every one of the 1,200 or so responses to the survey's open-ended questions. On a giant spreadsheet they would tabulate common from the responses, cross-referenced to department or companywide problems.
The process previously took 40 hours to complete, but with the AI perusing and categorizing the responses, the team could reallocate its time toward discussing the results with company leaders, Shreeve says.
"It was phenomenal in what it was saving us in time," she says. "We spent more time really digesting the data versus just trying to get organized." Company leaders were better informed as HR helped build department action plans based on the survey feedback and the operations team was able to explore options for improvement within the company.
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In another AI project, Shreeve and Weave CEO Brett White used
"We had to make sure the executives knew what the expectations were and that those expectations were clearly articulated," Shreeve says. "When we sit down with the comp committee, we have that data."
She even encouraged C-team members to use a chatbot in the self-assessment part of the performance review. "Instead of getting hung up on making sure it's perfect, put in all your notes and have ChatGPT organize it and get it cleaned up and save you time."
Revamping recruiting with AI
On the recruiting front, Karen Cosentino, chief people officer at Barge Design Solutions, says the engineering firm used ChatGPT-4 to create more engaging, better
Generative AI tools like chatbots save time for HR team members when they're seeking information or building a project from scratch, even if not all the information produced by the AI is relevant, says Emily Lee, senior director of HR at Deep Genomics, a biopharmaceutical company.
"It expedites the more tactical and tedious steps and allows us to focus on the value-added part of the work — coaching, guiding and really aligning the work and our HR programs with our organizational needs," Lee says.
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Chatbots applied to HR tasks still need close human oversight, of course. "AI has no context for fine-grained work, such as the settling of interpersonal conflicts or interpreting nuances in cultural dynamics," says Arvind Rongala, CEO of Edstellar corporate training services. Also, AI that analyzes employee responses can mistake sarcastic comments for complaints, he says.
Chatbots need to be directed with follow-up questions and corrections, and pushback to ensure they're "not just telling me what I want to hear," Shreeve says. "Where people go wrong in ChatGPT is they'll just be like: "Hey, I need a memo on X, Y, Z.' And then they just throw that in there."
An email created from an unrefined chatbot directive is easy to spot, she says. "Looking at it, I feel like I'm reading something that somebody wrote who didn't even know what was going on."
