If you’ve ever read an HR Brew story on AI, you’ve no doubt learned that AI tools can help companies improve employee productivity, but—no surprise—AI technology is also without question impacting many, many other core areas of the HR remit.
Australian-based teamwork and collaboration software company Atlassian is taking a “slow and methodical and intentional” approach to bringing AI tools into its employee experience program by partnering with experience management giant Qualtrics.
Atlassian’s head of people insights, Emma Crockett, told HR Brew, the company is methodically redeveloping the way it gathers, analyzes, and acts on employee feedback.
“[In] 2024…we were knee-deep in this AI hype cycle,” Crockett said. “But I also think that we’re starting to see that adopting AI for the sake of adopting AI doesn’t work. We need to find real solutions that AI is the right tool in the toolkit to solve, and so it still has to start with identifying the pain points.”
For Qualtrics’s chief workplace psychologist, Ben Granger, the quality of experience data and how to best leverage it is ripe for some improvement from AI, because the data EX pros are collecting and digesting (“emotional data, memory, data, attitudes, beliefs”) is hard to capture.
“We construct the [listening] instruments themselves, we process and analyze the data, and then we close the loop,” Granger said. “There’s applications of AI in all three of those veins.”
Atlassian collects and uses sentiment data collected via its survey strategy (biannual surveys and monthly pulses), but it also focuses on “moments data” along the entire employee life cycle. Additionally, Crockett noted that the company is “strongly focused on the behavioral data” such as attrition, hiring, and employee product-use data.
Atlassian deployed Qualtrics tools back in 2018, and over the last 18 months, it began reimagining its listening strategy with AI to bring feedback more to the forefront, Crockett said. In the last six months, Atlassian began utilizing a Qualtrics AI chatbot as a resource for HR business partners (HRBPs) to query for insights available on the Qualtrics Team Insights Pulse dashboard with natural language. The chatbot also helps with action-plan design for programs addressing those insights. It’s since expanded access to this tool to managers and leaders.
“It’s really significantly simplified the process of gathering those critical insights for organizations and allowed us to scale to every sort of HRBP and leader across the organization,” Crockett said.
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Qualtric’s comment summarization feature also helps process that employee feedback more efficiently and in a manner that addresses both the required cognitive load and human biases.
“If you get to an organization of our size, you have 14,000 comments, you’re not gonna be able to read each one of those individually,” Crockett said. “But I can summarize that in a really compelling way that still allows you to kind of read the comments verbatim.”
Additionally, a sentiment analysis tool leverages an LLM to level up the impact of this sort of reporting. The AI can indicate if sentiment is skewing positive or negative and mark its frequency.
Finally, Crockett pointed to an AI assistant tool right inside the surveys themselves, helping respondents complete questions in a more meaningful way. The AI can suggest an employee expand or clarify an answer if it’s too short or unclear, leading to prompts that are 10% longer, according to Crockett.
“You couldn’t do that on an individual basis, an employee survey is confidential,” Crockett said. “You could never sit beside an employee and be like, ‘Hey, that’s a little vague in that comment. Do you mind [rewriting]?’ So it does unlock this new power.”
So far there haven’t been any issues or outcomes requiring the company to pivot or change course, and Crockett noted that some of that is due to the deployment in this space being slow and intentional. Though she also pointed out that, like most new technology, there may be those moments in the future.
Six months into the journey, Crockett said the team is already finding value and plans to continue rolling out more features.
All of the company’s EX AI choices have been made with care for employee privacy, she added.
“We also have an obligation…as we’re talking about employee data, to be really conscious in how we approach it and how we protect our employees’ data and the types of decisions that we support with AI,” Crockett said. “There’s so many unknowns, we need to acknowledge the gaps that exist and establish a framework for mitigating those risks.”