AI is already entering the workplace, so how should employees make sure it doesn’t take their jobs?
For HR software company Lattice, the answer is to embrace it now and get ahead.
Last month, the company announced it was launching an AI agent designed to help HR teams. The agent would effectively give employees a digital copilot to answer questions about payroll, benefits, and other things they might usually message a human about.
On Tuesday, Lattice announced it’s rolling out more features to transform these tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.
They’ll sit in on 1:1 meetings with your manager. They’ll nudge you if they think an employee is disengaged and at risk of leaving the company. They’ll let you practice difficult questions before having them with other employees.
Notably, Lattice is applying those same techniques to other business departments beyond HR, with what it’s calling an “agent platform.” Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told Business Insider that IT and finance are two areas where these agents could be most helpful.
“I have an executive assistant as the CEO of a company, but my regular line engineer does not have an executive assistant,” said Franklin. Lattice’s proposal is: what if they did?
AI agents are a big theme in the corporate world right now. As the underlying AI models continue to improve rapidly, generative AI tools that can actually carry out helpful tasks and act more proactively are becoming more of a reality. But Franklin says many companies are struggling to make that leap.
“A lot of people are stuck at the starting line of, ‘how do I get this going for my employees, rather than just having a ChatGPT window?'” she said.
The elephant in the room
While Franklin says Lattice is trying to get AI to enhance employees, rather than find ways of replacing them, plenty of companies are trying to get AI to take on white-collar jobs.
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Franklin believes using AI to replace repetitive daily manual tasks, such as answering employee questions about payroll or health insurance plans, will free employees up for more “strategic” thinking.
She doesn’t deny that some companies will look to use these AI tools to replace some humans, but she also said that’s not what Lattice is trying to do. Instead, she sees the ability to offload menial tasks to AI as a way to make employees more productive and useful.
“We’re not able to have people focused on the things that are really important because they’re too busy doing the stuff that is logistical and not strategic,” she said.
Franklin says there will always be a human in the loop and that Lattice’s AI agents won’t act on their “proactive” recommendations, such as contacting an employee who has missed a deadline, without a warm body giving the OK. Some companies that were bullish on AI, such as Klarna, have about-turned in recent months after discovering that taking humans out of the loop backfired.
It’s a sign of just how unchartered these waters are. Lattice itself knows: jump back 10 months, and the company found itself in a media storm after announcing a new tool to let companies onboard AI “employees” and even give them official employment records.
It didn’t go over well, and Lattice later walked back the release, but Franklin still believes the idea at heart was correct.
“We need to treat them as employees that aren’t ghosts,” she told BI. That means holding AI agents to the same standards as human employees when it comes to security, compliance, and performance, she added, “so we have a deep understanding of how these entities are behaving.”
This, she said, will be important to preventing AI from just taking human jobs outright. It’s an optimistic take, and it might prove to be correct. But there’s also fear right now that AI agents will soon be good enough to wipe out many white-collar jobs. In some cases, they are already doing so.
“People have fear, uncertainty, doubt — this is why the time is now where we must all go through this change management, know how to be proficient, fluent, and elevated with AI so we’re not replaceable,” said Franklin.
“We prevent this by being proactive, by seeing the future and getting to it first.”
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