Among the many emerging AI trends, perhaps none is more intriguing to people leaders than the Augmented Connected Workforce (ACW). Named one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic tech trends for 2024, the ACW—a concept for integrating advanced technology into the workplace to enhance human abilities—has many in the HR community wondering what it means for the future of humanity at work.
The ACW will rely on a range of sophisticated technology, including augmented and virtual reality, Internet of Everything endpoints and prescriptions—and of course, AI—to forge a workforce in which humans and machines work as colleagues.
The purpose of ACW has been defined as “optimizing the value derived from human workers.” There are many different ways to interpret this. One might look at ACW as a means to enhance employee productivity and efficiency. Or better yet, might see the potential to free the human mind from tedium so it can innovate more creatively and engage with coworkers more empathetically.
HR thought leaders know there is a lot of potential—and a lot of need—for the latter of these two ambitions. That’s because empathy at work is in crisis. Businessolver’s 2023 State of Workplace Empathy research found that just 66% of employees believe their organizations are empathetic.
That number has been on a downward trend for the last several years, decreasing again from 69% of employees who said the same just one year prior. What’s more, there is a sizable variance in perception between employees and CEOs. A full 94% of CEOs considered their workplace to be empathetic, a 28-point gap between top decision-makers and their teams.
Unless technology is built with empathy in mind, the ACW could exacerbate, and maybe even accelerate this problem.
Empathetic Technology Disruption on the HR Horizon
Fortunately, there are several emerging use cases—and proven methods—for engineering the best of humanity into workplace technology. Take employee benefits chatbots, for example. Understanding and enrolling in right-fit benefits plans continues to perplex employees, making the experience ripe for empathetic technology disruption. That is precisely what is happening today.
Over the last decade, two-way communication vehicles in benefits administration platforms have evolved dramatically from the basic scripted robots of the past. Today, they continue to grow in human-like qualities. Acting as personalized, concierge-like virtual assistants, they interact with employees much like an HR coordinator would (if that HR coordinator had also ingested thousands of pages in benefits documents).
These AI-powered assistants go far beyond answering questions to make hyper-personalized recommendations based on what the AI knows about the employee. Plus, the introduction of generative AI has made conversations between the bots and employees much more meaningful. It does this by recognizing and responding to emotions and sentiments, such as confusion, anxiety, and frustration.
All of these elements are possible through thoughtful and intentional programming by humans who have designed and trained AI with empathetic capabilities, also known as “empathetic AI.”
How Empathetic AI is Improving the Employee Experience in an Augmented Workforce
Empathetic AI has the potential to improve the employee experience in an ACW world by leveraging machine learning, linguistic expertise, and generative AI to interact with people in increasingly human and personalized ways. And it’s already working. Among employees who chat with AI-powered virtual benefits assistants, for example, 89% have their issues resolved the same day.
Personalization, supercharged by empathetic AI, is a big piece of the humanity exhibited by today’s most advanced virtual assistants, and it will be a major component of effective ACW strategy. People want to be seen and interacted with as individuals across all aspects of their lives, and that extends to the workplace. When they are, they experience a greater sense of control over the information overload that challenges all people in the Age of Intelligence.
There’s no doubt that the HR leaders who are implementing AI solutions for the ACW will be forced to contend with many difficult challenges along the way. Advocating for the preservation of humanity at work is likely to be a major one. Under the direction of compassionate leaders, empathetic AI is one way to ensure the human mind remains the most impactful contributor to the world of work.
