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Workhuman, an Irish tech company, has built a $1.2bn revenue business out of what chief executive Eric Mosley calls the “core human need to be appreciated and the corresponding need to express gratitude”.
It might sound ironic, then, that it is turning to artificial intelligence to help staff deliver feedback to their co-workers.
The “social recognition” platform, where colleagues post praise for each others’ work and can recommend corresponding rewards, received an AI upgrade last month. With the click of a pen icon, users can call on a (sometimes condescending) virtual assistant to “coach” them to deliver a message with a bit more depth.
The tool, dubbed “Human Intelligence” is one of many social recognition or reward platforms to incorporate AI. It stands ready to spruce up our syntax, flag iffy language and crunch the data that colleagues’ emotional responses generate. If it’s the thought that counts, can tech-enhanced emotional intelligence really make us feel more valued at work?
Workhuman agrees the personal touch is vital. “We don’t want an AI engine writing these recognition moments,” says Adam Basilio, director of product strategy (or “product evangelism and activation” as he styles it). “We really want it to be human-generated, organic”. People should feel “emotional” when they receive a message.
The human element also remains a selling point for competitors, even as they introduce more advanced software. This year, rewards platform Benifex declared AI could personalise benefits and streamline HR. Bonusly, another company offering perks to reflect praise from colleagues, said “human-centric skills, like collaboration and communication” were “the new competitive advantage” as AI takes on routine tasks.
Workhuman users — including staff at BP, Cisco and LinkedIn — can redeem notes of praise for vouchers, merchandise or other goodies. The new AI element makes these more accurate by indicating appropriate reward levels, within budgets set by companies.
The benefit for managers is the crowdsourced data AI can deliver — from pinpointing mentors with the right skills to spotting the high-performing staff companies should retain.
Kerry Dryburgh, executive vice-president for people and culture at energy group BP, says Workhuman’s software has been a “game-changer” for enabling “feedback on a continuous basis” and plans to upgrade to the AI-powered tool.
“What really gets [managers] over the initial scepticism is when they start to see the data that comes out,” Workhuman CEO Mosley says. With Human Intelligence, they can chat with “the world’s first recognition-specific language model” about how best to use insights gleaned from the feedback.
For Bruce Daisley, a workplace culture consultant and former Twitter executive, AI enhancements amplify existing risks of recognition software. “There are definitely benefits to these gratitude tools. By all means find ways for us to offer more kindness, more respect, more recognition,” he says. “But we don’t want to take the humanity out of heartfelt actions and I think that’s the danger.”
AI can be surprisingly empathetic. In a Harvard Business School-led study published last month, researchers looked at how teams used AI to help them collaborate. They found people with AI assistance reported “positive emotional responses” that matched or exceeded teams without AI — and concluded the tech could “fulfil part of the social and motivational role traditionally offered by human teammates”.
Workhuman uses an in-house language model, trained on millions of employee messages, on top of open-source large language models. That means the AI delivers “shockingly accurate” insights for managers, Mosley says. And “with more data, the IQ of the AI gets higher”.
Hopefully that will save us from homogenised HR-speak, although, alas, it hasn’t stopped the AI assistant sounding patronising: stock phrases include “this is shaping up nicely” or “Wow! You’ve just crafted a recognition moment that will leave a lasting impact”.
But whether we cheer or cringe may ultimately come down to the people who use it. As Daisley notes: “There are organisations where this is going to be incredibly helpful and others where unfortunately it becomes another part of . . . a performative bureaucracy.”
