Live coverage from Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference.
Employees won’t truly embrace AI because they’re told to.
Or because you ran a tokenmaxxing contest.
Or because they’re told it’s the future.
“The most successful transformation in AI adoption happens when there is a clear and urgent pain,” explained Fred Tan, global head of social impact and deputy director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the HPE Foundation. “When the pain is so intense that it drives people to the solution that you want to implement.”
Tan spoke as part of a fireside keynote Tuesday at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference.
Tan framed AI adoption not as a technology challenge or even a messaging challenge, but one of company culture and understanding.
For instance, one pain point in HPE is that workers don’t feel they have the tools they need to do their jobs.
That’s a good observation, but you can’t stop there. You have to dig deeper.
“Then we start digging: OK, what is your job? What are you trying to do? What would success look like? And then how can we first, again, transform your workflow and your actual job to simplify it as much as possible?”
And Tan believes communicators are naturally well-positioned to push deeper and ask these questions to truly understand pain points.
“I feel like communicators tend to be really good at asking questions. At least every time I’ve interacted with a communicator, they have asked me fantastic questions,” Tan said. “And so I think you actually have a head start.”
Asking all these questions can help you truly solve problems rather than just introduce technology. But it does come with a risk, Tan warned.
“I’ve also seen organizations sometimes afraid to ask negative questions to figure out the pain points and to figure out the manholes in their work. They’re afraid to ask because the moment they ask, they have the responsibility and accountability to actually do something about it.”
That means the people solving these problems — often some combination of communications, HR and IT — have to be empowered to make real change.
In most cases, comms teams won’t be the ones picking out new enterprise LLMs. Instead, they’re often emotional interpreters of the situation.
“Change is an emotional problem wrapped in a business context,” Tan said. “Sometimes we get the business context right. Sometimes we get it wrong. Most of the time, we get the emotional problem absolutely wrong because we don’t bring internal communicators in enough and early enough.”
When communicators are brought in early, they can act as bridge builders to define the employee groups affected and bring together teams that may otherwise approach the transformation differently.
That’s much better than bringing in comms at the last minute to message a policy that’s already set in stone.
Bringing communicators in early also gives them a chance to challenge a more fundamental assumption: whether the work should be automated at all.
Tan said his team regularly identifies work that no longer serves a purpose and eliminates it before considering how AI might improve the remaining process.
“You don’t need AI to do it because you actually don’t even need to do it,” he said.
AI transformation truly begins when an organization understands what employees are trying to accomplish and removes the friction standing in their way, rather than giving them another checklist task.
That requires someone to connect the teams making the decisions with the employees expected to change how they work.
“Companies are craving a team and leaders to be the connective tissue to bring fragmented groups together,” Tan said, “and I think that internal communicators are those people.”
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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