Since the introduction of OpenAI and ChatGPT, many forward-looking internal communications professionals have started investigating how to leverage AI to work smarter and make a bigger impact on overall business success.
The good news is that there are many ways communicators can leverage the power of AI in many different ways, and business leaders are taking note: 72% of decision-makers agree that AI can enable humans to focus on more meaningful work, according to PwC.
Furthermore, according to an Oracle and Workplace Intelligence report, 82% of employees surveyed believed AI can support their careers better than humans, and a whopping 85% wanted technology to help define their future.
Internal communicators need to understand the benefits of AI in their jobs and stop seeing it as a threat. Moreover, possessing the ability to utilize AI will be an essential skill for workers in the near future. According to Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, one of its top three findings states that every employee must possess AI proficiency. According to the report, as of March 2023, there has been a 79% increase in U.S. job postings on LinkedIn mentioning GPT compared to the previous year.
So let’s take a look into how AI can be leveraged to improve your organization’s internal communications strategy.
1. Reduce Time Wasted On Information Search
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. On average, that’s 9.3 hours per week!
In other words, more than 1 in 5 employees do not contribute any value to an organization due to time wasted on information search.
A report by IDC found that knowledge workers spend more than 6 hours per week searching and gathering information, and around 4.5 hours per week they spend searching for documents.
Unfortunately, many enterprise intranet solutions still lack advanced search functionalities so employees end up wasting hours of precious time looking for information they need fast.
AI can come very handy here!
For example, Haiilo’s social intranet leverages AI to make information search seamless for employees. When employees have a specific work-related question, they get an answer instead of a list of different links and resources to work with. Think Google Search versus ChatGPT. When you perform a search on Google you get pages and pages of links with content that may or may not be relevant. With ChatGPT you get a comprehensive, clear, and easily consumable answer to your question.
This is a game-changer in the world of information overload which is one of the biggest productivity killers for employees and organizations across the globe.
📹 Take a look how Haiilo leverages AI to enable employees to find information at scale (among other things 😉)
2. Boost Employee Experience with Personalized Content
Businesses have strategies and tools for personalizing the customer experience at scale; now, they are looking for ways to deliver that same experience for the talent they are trying to engage and retain.
One of the biggest challenges internal communicators face today is catching employees’ attention in the sea of generic, unpersonalized content. Employees are being bombarded with information from many different sides – business users are sending and receiving about 120 emails every day, according to a report by the Radicati Group.
In internal communications, AI and machine learning can be leveraged to deliver the right content in front of the right people at the right time, and through the right channel, resulting in a much bigger readership and engagement with future communications.
Advanced internal communications platforms leverage AI to analyze user activity, understand employee interests, and predict future engagement. Based on data, communicators can identify specific employee profiles, create segments (based on locations, job functions, departments, and many others), and get recommendations around what type of content employees are likely to engage the most with.
Such hyper-personalization is what we experience every day in our private lives. Our social media platforms are loaded with content that relates to us and is interesting to us. This should be no different in the workplace, and AI can make it happen.
Furthermore, communicators can leverage features like AI-powered multilingual translation to overcome language barriers in the workplace and provide tailored content experiences to global workforces. Many people have been using tools like Google Translate for years, and they have become excellent in what they do.
Such AI-powered translation tools could, and should, be embedded into workplace technology to automatically translate messages, conversations, documents, or presentations. In a world where workplace accessibility is one of the major concerns for many employers, AI should be leveraged to make things more accessible to every employee regardless of their spoken language.
Haiilo uses AI to boost employee experience. Learn how!
3. Work Smarter with Better Data and Automation
One of the most common ways companies leverage AI is to analyze large volumes of raw data. This can come in very handy in HR and internal communications departments that regularly measure their employees’ pulse to improve the overall employee experience. Over 70% of companies use people analytics to improve their performance, according to a Deloitte report.
AI can identify patterns and provide insights from data collected from employee feedback, employee surveys, and other interactions within internal social platforms. This information is valuable for understanding employee sentiment, preferences, and concerns, and can enable employers to better tailor their communications and come up with new employee experience initiatives.
The most advanced solutions use AI to provide actionable recommendations for improvements with the biggest impact on the ultimate business goals.
For example, consider a company that conducts regular pulse surveys and leverages AI to analyze the results. AI detects a recurring theme of employees expressing a desire for more growth opportunities. By proactively addressing employee aspirations, the company demonstrates its commitment to growth and fosters a sense of loyalty and engagement among its workforce.
With a lot of great insights, it is also easier to automate activities and workflows, eliminating manual and repetitive tasks. So in human resources and internal communications, AI can also be used to streamline the process of collecting and analyzing employee feedback through automated surveys and sentiment analysis.
In the past few years, HR’s ability to use sophisticated, reliable AI and automation tools at scale has skyrocketed. Adoption is especially prevalent among larger companies, as 42% of firms with at least 5,000 workers reported using AI for HR tasks in early 2022.
4. Create Content 10 Times Faster
Many content creators agree that generative AI makes them much more efficient in their work. The ones who are afraid of using it and scared about AI taking over their jobs are already lagging behind.
A World Economic Forum article, created using a language model that was AI trained by OpenAI, defined generative AI as
“a category of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that generate new outputs based on the data they have been trained on. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI creates new content in the form of images, text, audio, and more.”
As the amount of content we consume and produce has been growing exponentially, internal communicators are under a lot of pressure to keep up with the pace and produce content that actually grabs attention.
To create high-quality content, they need more time to focus on what matters. Luckily, with AI, internal communicators don’t ever have to create content from scratch. While content bots should never be used to replace internal comms, they should be used to produce structures and body copy for content quickly and at volume. Then, a human touch should be added to turn the content into an interesting and unique piece that grabs the user’s attention.
📹 Take a look at why the dilemma of the blank page is no longer a thing thanks to Haiilo AVA with which internal communicators create content 10x faster!
5. Enable Employees to Become Great Ambassadors
Oftentimes, internal communications and HR professionals are responsible for driving employee advocacy in the workplace. If you are one of them, this last but not least use of AI may be of your interest.
Some social intranets and employee experience platforms have built-in employee advocacy features and functionalities that enable employees to easily share the company’s content with their audiences, boost their social selling activities, and improve recruitment marketing initiatives.
The most advanced vendors have started leveraging generative AI to make this process even more streamlined and easier for employees, resulting in higher engagement around ambassadorship activities.
Based on the content employees want to share externally, AI can summarize the articles and come up with catchy social media captions.
There are no more excuses for low participation in your employee advocacy campaigns!
Download our Employee Engagement Report and learn what drives and motivates modern employees!
