A little more than a year ago, my CTO asked me to hop on an urgent Zoom. He had something he needed to show me, he said. It was OpenAI’s newly released ChatGPT. As the CEO of a company that delivers HR compliance content and guidance, I was alarmed. “This could destroy our business,” I told him.
Fast-forward one year, and we’re in a completely different place. Instead of distancing ourselves from artificial intelligence, we’ve embraced it. We ran experiments on ChatGPT to see how well it could handle compliance questions we receive from our customers. We created an internal task force dedicated to understanding and incorporating AI across our company. Then, we started to build our own custom GPTs to test whether we could combine the best of what we do with this emerging technology.
Although we pivoted from a place of fear to one of enthusiasm, getting here wasn’t easy. Setting the strategy was relatively straightforward, but creating the cultural foundation was a more complicated undertaking. It took countless conversations, some mistakes, a lot of self-reflection, and careful planning to reenvision both our company and the HR experience of our customers in an AI-enabled world.
As companies race to integrate AI into their tech stacks and workflows, it’s easy to forget about integrating it into workplace culture along the way. The businesses primed to win in the AI era are those that invest not just in their AI strategy but also in a modern culture that embraces this technology and responds rapidly to the unexpected opportunities and risks that it will bring.
Before any company sets out to implement its AI strategy, its leadership must ask themselves three questions to assess their cultural readiness.
Do our employees have a strong sense of purpose?
Eight out of ten executives agree that “a strong sense of shared purpose drives employee satisfaction, facilitates business transformation, and helps boost customer loyalty.” The importance of purpose is about to rise even further.
Artificial intelligence now meets or exceeds human performance in many areas, including handwriting recognition, speech recognition, image recognition, reading comprehension, and common-sense completion. And that’s just the beginning.
To leverage the capabilities of AI, we need our teams to let go of tasks they’ve historically done. Employees whose identities are anchored in these tasks will resist this change, as AI represents an existential threat. But employees whose identities are anchored in a broader mission will embrace them, as AI represents a transformational catalyst.
As a company that takes pride in rapidly and expertly answering HR questions, I often heard the following concern: “We can’t let ChatGPT answer customer questions because that’s what our HR experts do. They love what they do, and they’re great at it.” But the fundamental problem wasn’t the threat of a new technology. It was that we were focusing on the task level, not the mission level.
So I offered the following challenge to our team: “If all we care about is helping as many businesses as possible build as many successful teams as possible, and you have 50% more time to advance that mission even further, what would you do?” Once we elevated our view to our mission of helping our customers build thriving teams, AI turned from a threat to resist to an opportunity our team could embrace.
How well do we listen?
By its very nature, AI is not predictable. The effects of integrating AI will be experienced by frontline employees and customers long before they are seen in the boardroom. Businesses need to rapidly internalize, analyze, and respond to those effects, doubling down on the positive ones and mitigating the negative ones.
As we began to implement AI we also implemented new and better ways of listening to our employees and customers. At a company meeting shortly after the release of ChatGPT, we invited employees to anonymously share the word that best described their feelings about AI at that moment. The results were all over the map: excited, scared, hopeful, anxious, concerned, motivated. It was clear we had some employees chomping at the bit to use it, and others with legitimate fears about job losses and data protection. This feedback gave us important data on our team’s readiness to utilize AI.
So we dug deeper, conducting in-depth surveys, sentiment analyses, and conversations to better understand what was driving our employees’ reactions. We then used this data to inform and refine our internal communications and our overall strategy.
As we began to experiment with ChatGPT, we also opened new lines of communication to ensure that learnings, failures, and successes were shared rapidly. We created a companywide Slack channel for real-time and organic collaboration and feedback. In addition, employees who were now using AI in their workflows were asked to report back on their progress. And we established detailed rubrics for grading ChatGPT’s output, for instance assessing its accuracy, bias, brevity, and applicability for our customers.
Each of these techniques ensured that we understood how our implementation of AI was affecting both our employees and customers and that we could adapt as needed.
Do we encourage our employees to fail?
A few months after ChatGPT was released we surveyed our employees and discovered a troubling paradox: Most of our employees said they were comfortable with generative AI and believed it could make their jobs easier. And yet very few said they were using it.
The reason was simple: Our employees were afraid to fail. After learning about ChatGPT, we initially went on the defensive, implementing policies and trainings that warned employees about the risks of generative AI. Employees interpreted these communications as the company taking a zero-risk approach.
After seeing the survey results, we pivoted. Rather than make the risks of generative AI the end of the conversation, we reframed them as part of the process of being ready to utilize artificial intelligence successfully, and we actively encouraged our employees to experiment in responsible ways. Our team was then empowered and motivated to run experiments on ChatGPT—for instance, to see how well it could answer HR compliance questions compared to our own in-house experts.
The results were mixed. In some cases we found that ChatGPT could answer basic compliance questions; in other instances it was wildly off. But in the process, we learned how to feed it the highest-quality prompts to get the best returns. It opened our eyes to how valuable AI could be in enabling us to serve our customers even better and faster.
Today, the businesses that win aren’t the ones that build the fastest; they’re the ones that learn the fastest. That principle will be even more true in the AI era, as new opportunities, risks, and competitive advantages are unlocked at unprecedented speed. A culture of failing forward ensures that the organization’s strategy and execution will continuously evolve to meet the moment.
As businesses race to adopt AI, it is crucial to remember that success lies not just in a robust AI strategy but in fostering a culture that’s capable of embracing change. By asking these questions, not only can companies assess their cultural readiness for AI but they also can ensure harmonious integration that maximizes both technological advancements and human potential.
