COMP NEWS – A professional services firm is using A.I. to calculate managers’ and executives’ scores based on employee satisfaction within the company.

Employers are scrambling to infuse new generative A.I. tools into their people practices, but professional services firm Genpact has been iterating A.I. tools for years.

 

For Genpact, A.I. isn’t just a cyclical fad. The technology has proved an essential tool in understanding and engaging its workforce, specifically in the use of three platforms: Amber, its employee engagement bot; Genome, an A.I.-enhanced internal learning and development portal; and Watercooler, an A.I. integration that helps employees forge informal connections companywide.

 

Genpact’s people team sees a huge upside for generative A.I. in retention efforts. In 2018, it launched Amber as a test to help measure employee engagement and sentiment.

 

It’s an approach that has replaced the traditional, and at times ineffective, employee engagement survey. Amber interacts with new hires eight to 10 times a year in their first six months and at least four times a year for all other employees. The chatbot inputs employee responses and asks questions based on past and present answers, becoming more “intelligent” as it accumulates data. At the end of each conversation, Amber generates a mood score reflecting the employee’s sentiments.

The use of A.I. was employed after Genpact found that regular employee surveys were ineffective due to lengthy processes, which it at risk of losing talent.

Piyush Mehta, Genpact’s chief human resources officer, says regular employee surveys were unproductive and laborious because they required human orchestration throughout the lengthy process, from outreach to analysis to action. The company also found it challenging to continuously measure mood and organizational sentiment with traditional surveys, putting it at risk of losing valued talent.

 

The chatbot provides real-time analytics, allowing Genpact to create policies that reflect the workforce’s immediate wants and needs, the firm says. The tech-first approach has proved successful, Genpact says. It receives an average response rate of 82%, up from 77% in 2022.

 

Employee perception is a top priority for the company, which in 2020 tied 10% of its CEO and top 150 leaders’ bonuses to Amber’s mood scores. The mood score is determined by how employees rate their experience at Genpact on a five-point Likert scale. The company says it has consistently maintained an average mood score of 4.2 over the past year, just above the service industry average of 4.1.

As companies find new ways to use A.I., they also grapple with questions surrounding the ethicality of its uses.

The use of A.I. in any capacity comes with ethical challenges. Modi says that when Genpact’s learning and development gurus initially used generative A.I. to pull information from the web to create content, some copied content directly from online sources, effectively plagiarizing. Modi’s team responded by implementing a manual review process, encouraging people to flag content that looked to be plagiarized, but she quickly found the method was confusing for employees. People struggled to tell the difference.

 

“Many people were marking somebody else’s work as plagiarized even though it was not,” says Modi. Her team landed on a new method that seems to be more effective: random sampling and using A.I. to detect plagiarism (perhaps the most meta solution yet).

 

There are also legal considerations when using A.I. in talent strategy. Some markets where Genpact has a presence, such as the U.K. and Germany, don’t allow certain A.I.-enhanced people analysis tools owing to regulation. Some regions consider individual network structure data sensitive, even if users consent. Because of this, the company says it takes a more conservative approach in those areas and has chosen not to process data points for its Watercooler platform in the EU.

To read more about Genpact’s use of A.I. to determine bonuses, click here.

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