AI ~ 7 min

Generative AI’s Role in Employee Communication: From Challenges to Solutions

Jean-Louis Benard, CEO, Sociabble
Jean-Louis Benard CEO

In the evolving landscape of employee communication, generative AI emerges as a transformative force. Its potential to reshape how companies communicate internally is immense, offering solutions to longstanding challenges and opening doors to innovative strategies, all thanks to the power of deep generative models.

Challenges in Employee Communication Addressed by Generative AI Models

Content Production Constraints

Internal communication teams often operate under constraints. These compact teams bear the significant responsibility of producing content that aligns with the company’s strategy, values, and mission.

Given their limited bandwidth, communications can sometimes be inconsistent or delayed, leading to challenges in delivering timely and consistent internal communications. Generative AI can address these issues.

Need for Personalized Communication

Building on the challenge of producing consistent and timely content is the added dimension of personalization. Different departments, roles, and individual employees have unique communication needs, making it a complex puzzle for organizations to solve.

The challenge of producing content is all the more complicated as the content needs to be personalized and tailored to resonate with specific audiences.

For example, a company headquartered in Delhi may need to issue tailored safety regulations for factory workers in Raigarh, Maharashtra, in accordance with state regulations. This communication must not only target a specific geographical location but also be delivered in the regional Maharashtrian language and directed specifically to factory supervisors. 

Generative AI systems excel at identifying and tailoring target groups, and they can even produce relatable, humanized content thanks to technology like natural language processing and large language models. 

Agility in Crisis Situations

In today’s fast-paced world, situations can change rapidly. Companies need to be agile in their response, especially in crisis situations, like the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, where timely and accurate communication becomes crucial.

Decentralizing Content Production

Decentralizing content production by tapping into the expertise of individuals across the organization can ensure accurate and insightful content. However, experts might lack the time or familiarity with corporate communication guidelines, making this approach challenging.

With generative AI, individual employees are empowered to create post-worthy content, including even image generation thanks to technologies like recurrent neural networks. 

Bottom-up Communication

Employee communication isn’t just top-down. Bottom-up communication emphasizes news and stories from the field, but employees often face challenges like the “syndrome of the blank page” or fear of overstepping corporate guidelines. Often, a generative AI model can provide the creative boost that employees need. 

Feedback and Analytics

Feedback is essential for effective communication. However, gathering feedback and analyzing it, especially with sophisticated platforms, presents significant challenges for internal communication teams.

Generative AI: What is It and How Can Companies Leverage It? 

Generative AI is a cutting-edge technology that can produce content, simulate human-like text, and offer solutions to a myriad of challenges.

In the realm of employee communication, its potential is vast, promising to transform traditional methods and usher in a new era of efficiency and innovation. In order to be harnessed, however, the full capabilities and use cases of generative AI need to be understood. 

Benefits of Generative AI when Integrated into Employee Communication

generative ai employee communications

Consistent and Timely Content Production

Generative AI can assist in producing content that is consistent in tone and voice, aligning seamlessly with the company’s strategy, values, and mission.

With the Sociabble platform, content generated with AI inherently takes into account the company’s specific tone of voice and any requirements defined by administrators. This ensures that communications are not only timely but also adhere perfectly to the company’s guidelines.

Employees don’t need to be experts in prompting or aligning content with company requirements; Sociabble manages this complexity behind the scenes. However, it’s not a black box; administrators retain full control, ensuring that the AI-generated content aligns with the company’s ethos and guidelines.

Personalized and Targeted Communication

Generative AI can analyze the preferences and needs of different departments and roles, tailoring content to resonate with specific audiences. With Sociabble, the platform can automatically translate content into the language that employees understand best, ensuring clarity and comprehension across global teams.

Moreover, by streamlining the content creation process, Sociabble gives more time back to internal communication teams. This additional time can be invested in crafting more specific and targeted content, ensuring that communications resonate deeply with the intended audience.

Rapid Response in Crisis Situations

In situations that demand rapid communication, platforms like Sociabble that integrate generative AI stand out. For crisis communication, internal communication teams can utilize features like “Must read” and “Must watch” on the Sociabble platform.

These features not only ensure that critical content is disseminated swiftly but also make reading the content or watching the video mandatory for employees. The platform tracks and provides insights on who has engaged with the content, ensuring complete transparency and accountability.

By accelerating the process of crafting and disseminating messages in high-pressure situations, companies can mitigate potential risks and ensure that employees are well-informed, reducing the scope for confusion or misinformation.

Empowering Experts to Share Insights

Platforms that integrate generative AI can empower experts within the organization to share their insights without the burden of crafting extensive content.

With Sociabble, the AI can assist in structuring their knowledge, ensuring it aligns with corporate guidelines, and making the content creation process more efficient.

Amplifying Voices from the Field

With Sociabble, employees are encouraged and supported in sharing their daily experiences, successes, and insights.

The integrated AI offers suggestions, structures their stories, and ensures the content aligns with corporate guidelines, empowering employees to share their perspectives without fear.

Transforming Feedback into Actionable Insights

Modern employee communication platforms that integrate AI capabilities offer a unique advantage when it comes to feedback and analytics.

These platforms can swiftly gather feedback from a diverse workforce and then utilize AI to sift through the responses, identifying trends and understanding sentiments. This rapid analysis translates into actionable strategies, ensuring that feedback is not just collected but also effectively utilized.

Risks of Generative AI in Employee Communication and How to Address Them

Data Privacy and Security Concerns

One of the primary concerns with AI-based generative models, especially in the context of employee communication, is the potential for data breaches and misuse of sensitive internal information.

This is particularly critical as the information pertains to internal matters that shouldn’t be disclosed externally. Sociabble prioritizes data privacy and security. The platform does not connect with public versions of generative AI models that might put client data at risk.

Instead, Sociabble’s generative AI features rely on private versions of models, ensuring a secure environment where client data is never used for cross-client training.

Potential for Misinformation & Incorrect Training Data

Generative AI models can sometimes produce content that might be inaccurate or misaligned with company values. Sociabble emphasizes the importance of human-AI collaboration, as it pertains to foundation models.

While generative AI can assist in content creation, human oversight ensures that the content is accurate, relevant, and aligns with the company’s values and guidelines.

Conclusion

Generative AI holds the promise to revolutionize employee communication, addressing challenges and offering innovative solutions.

While there are inherent risks associated with these and other generative AI models, with the right strategies and platforms like Sociabble, these can be effectively managed.

As the landscape of employee communication evolves, integrating generative AI models can ensure that companies stay ahead of the curve, delivering timely, relevant, and impactful communications to their workforce.