Editorial
Algorithms now guide nearly everything in our lives, from what we watch to what we buy and even what we eat, add to our calendars and interact with our cars! And while these algorithms are often right, sometimes they miss the mark in frustratingly obvious ways. Why?
Because to machines, experience is about data, efficiency and optimization, while to humans, experience is something else entirely. It’s about connection, authenticity, purpose. Being seen, heard and valued, and receiving expected levels of service.
As artificial intelligence reshapes how we work and how we live, the challenge for us is clear: how do we build systems that serve our business objectives without losing sight of the people who power those objectives? How do we center the human experience in a digital world?
Experience Is the New Differentiator
The integration of AI into workplace operations isn’t theoretical. We’re doing it every day. Virtual assistants respond to employee questions and book appointments. Machine learning models match resumes to roles. Intelligent automation eliminates repetitive tasks. All of this can be good for business, but only if it’s good for people, too.
Experience, whether we’re talking about customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), the U.S. Army’s Soldier Experience (SX) or the increasingly prevalent total experience (TX), has become the differentiator between success and failure. Positive experiences are the backbone of engagement, retention and performance. That’s what makes innovation possible and brands magnetic.
But even though we can collect experience metrics and do sentiment analysis and employ numerous different measures and algorithms, experience defies automation. It has to be designed intentionally, with people at the center.
What Makes an Experience 'Human'?
A human-centered employee experience goes beyond perks and paychecks. It’s built on three pillars. In the Army, we look at the combination of three major things: Quality of Life, Quality of Work and Connection.
- Quality of Life is about everything from the basics of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to flexibility, work-life balance, compensation and more.
- Quality of Work means that we’re providing people with meaningful, challenging and value-added tasks, and providing them with the tools and opportunities to accomplish those tasks, to provide that value.
- And finally, Connection is about shared values, a shared sense of purpose, belonging and impact.
When these pillars are strong, employees are engaged and organizations thrive. When they’re weak? Turnover spikes, productivity lags and customer satisfaction often suffers in kind. EX and CX are tightly interwoven; your people can’t take care of your customers if no one takes care of them.
So how do we know if we are providing a good experience or not?
Measuring What Matters
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and yes, that includes experience. While it might feel intangible and need to be designed by humans, we now have better tools than ever to quantify how people feel about their work and connect those feelings to outcomes that matter.
Here are a few measures to start with:
- Employee Sentiment and Engagement Scores: Go beyond traditional surveys. Use conversational AI and continuous listening tools to surface nuanced, real-time feedback on belonging, well-being and purpose.
- Retention, Turnover and Internal Mobility: Track not just who’s leaving, but who’s staying, and why. High mobility and internal growth indicate that people feel valued and see a future in your organization.
- Performance and Productivity Metrics: Look for correlations between experience initiatives and hard metrics like project success, time-to-productivity and quality of output. Happy people do better work.
- Customer Outcomes: If your EX and CX are aligned, shifts in employee sentiment should show up in customer satisfaction, net promoter scores and brand loyalty.
These data points don’t just live in HR. When integrated across systems, they become part of a broader people analytics strategy that ties talent decisions to organizational outcomes.
AI Can Help … But Only if We Ask the Right Questions
AI has extraordinary potential to personalize the employee experience, from recommending career paths to surfacing learning opportunities. But it can also reinforce bias, remove agency or reduce people to inputs in a system.
Unless we stay vigilant.
The question isn’t, “Should we use AI in HR?” It’s, “Are we using it to amplify the human experience, or diminish it?”
Along with this question, we have to ask ourselves whether these tools are creating more meaningful work, whether we’re using automation to free up time for creativity and connection, and whether our employees can see themselves in the systems being built. If all we’re doing is creating faster transactions and depersonalizing things, we’re not helping.
As new tools come online, HR leaders must act as ethical architects. We must ensure that digital transformation enhances the dignity and value of human work, rather than eroding it.
The Business Case for Human-Centered Design
Putting humans first isn’t just a moral imperative. It’s a strategic one.
Here’s a few ways that EX drives business outcomes:
- Performance: Gallup research shows companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable than those with low engagement.
- Innovation: Psychological safety, enabled by trust, clarity and connection, is the foundation of creative thinking and adaptability.
- Reputation: In the era of Glassdoor and LinkedIn, your employee experience is your employer brand. Satisfied employees are your most credible advocates.
If you want to build a culture that wins in the age of AI, start by building one where people thrive.
So How Do I Lead?
As technology evolves, so must our approach to work and to leadership. People frequently worry that AI will take their jobs, but what it really is doing is evolving work. Folks who remember email's introduction into work may remember that it was touted as a way to reduce work, because you wouldn’t be walking from desk to desk dropping notices and memos into in-boxes. Instead, you could send an email.
I think we know that email didn’t reduce work. It evolved it.
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As AI and automation continue to evolve our work, HR evolves also, not as a transactional function but as a steward of the employee experience and a translator between human needs and business goals.
That means we partner across functions to integrate EX and CX into strategic decisions. We invest in AI literacy to help teams understand the tools shaping their work and how they may need to adjust the design of experience according to expectations. And it means we hold ourselves accountable to metrics that reflect how people feel, and not just how they perform.
The future of work isn’t about replacing humans with machines, it’s about designing systems where both can succeed. The organizations that get this right won’t just adapt. They’ll lead.
Because when you put the human experience at the center, everything else — your productivity, performance, innovation and profit — tends to follow.
Editor's Note: Read more about how to face the leadership challenges that AI is raising below:
- People-Centric Leadership and AI: Can We Have Both? — AI can support people-first leadership, if we use it with care.
- If We Want AI to Help HR, HR Has to Join the Conversation — Engineers are designing AI systems to address problems that are rooted in the very systems HR understands best.
- The New Playbook of Employee Experience — Organizations that treat engagement as an outcome of good design, not a program to fix, will build meaningful employee connections.
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