Study suggests how to improve employee proficiency with AI

(BPT) - Have you set your employees up for success? While you may think you’ve given them all the tools needed to perform proficiently, if generative AI (GenAI) isn’t one of them, employees are operating at a disadvantage and you risk falling behind.

How can GenAI help your employees? According to Coveo’s EX Industry Report, “Can Generative AI Empower Employees to Do More on Their Own?” 40% of U.S. and U.K. employees think GenAI can help them find things faster by personalizing their intranet use.

The report’s findings provide other powerful insights into what employees want from workplace GenAI. Check out these six findings and the key takeaways you can implement at your organization.

1. Humans preferred

Employees continue to be the foundation of a great customer experience. Even when customers prefer self-service, 64% of them say the experience would be improved if they had a human on standby should something go wrong.

Key takeaway: Using GenAI isn’t about replacing human employees. Rather, it’s a tool that enables customers and employees to improve the customer experience and their own proficiency.

2. Lacking the right information at work leads to frustration and burnout

When employees can’t find the answers or resources they need to do their job, dissatisfaction is sure to follow. According to the study, one-third (34%) reported frustration and burnout due to inadequate tools. Also, 30% felt less confident in their work quality and information-sharing skills.

Key takeaway: Customers want information, so it’s imperative to empower your employees to give them accurate answers. Tools like GenAI-powered search can enhance your workforce’s capability, ultimately decreasing employees’ frustration, fatigue and turnover.

3. Knowledge of GenAI workplace policies is limited

Do you have a GenAI policy in place, and are your employees aware of it? Nearly 60% of respondents in the U.S. and U.K. said their workplace lacked a GenAI policy or they were unaware of one. Interestingly, awareness was highest among executive and senior management (75%), while junior staff at the largest organizations were least likely to be informed.

Key takeaway: If you don’t have a GenAI workplace policy, it’s time to create one. Many publicly available GenAI tools can expose organizations to risks from security, IP, hallucinations and more. It’s important for employees to know how to benefit from GenAI while protecting your brand, themselves and your customers. Once you have a policy, it’s vital that everyone in the company in every department is informed about the policy.

4. Is it a hallucination or not? Employees often can't tell if they've encountered a GenAI hallucination.

Hallucinations are convincing, inaccurate answers generated by AI, and they’re more common than you may think. One-quarter of survey respondents said they had encountered a hallucination, while almost a third were unsure. Hallucinations can potentially bog down employees with inaccurate information that they may pass on to clients.

Key takeaway: GenAI workplace training can help employees spot hallucinations and protect your company’s integrity. You can take it a step further by providing your workforce with a trusted GenAI platform vetted by your organization that is known to provide accurate information. Who are large enterprises trusting? Many are using AI platforms like Coveo’s that leverage more than a decade of AI experience to help bring search, recommendations, personalization and now generative answering to every point of the employee experience.

5. Employees are keeping guardrails up due to a lack of trust in GenAI tools

Employees are curious about GenAI, but they have their misgivings. Because of hallucinations and a general lack of trust in GenAI tools, employees are wasting valuable time checking AI-generated answers. In fact, over one-third always fact-check generated answers. Staff and management trust enterprise-approved tools more than public ones but still fact-check.

Key takeaway: Help your employees become familiar with uses for GenAI at the workplace and provide them with tools they can trust. By doing so, they’ll be less likely to waste time double-checking AI-generated answers and more time serving customers.

6. While companies evaluate GenAI tools, employees are forging ahead using publicly available (and potentially untrustworthy) tools

If your company hasn’t selected and implemented GenAI tools, you risk your employees using non-permitted tools on their own. How prevalent is non-permitted tool use? According to the report, the phenomenon was shockingly highest among IT personnel (24%) and executive leadership or software development (21%).

Key takeaway: Given the prevalent use of GenAI among executives and tech-savvy workers, companies must clarify the rules and risks around the use of public generative tools. To avoid the risk altogether, organizations should consider leveraging tools that meet the security, accuracy and relevance that will benefit employees and deliver measurable business results.

Enable your people or risk being left behind

It’s clear that implementing GenAI tools in your organization is paramount to staying relevant in today’s fiercely competitive digital arena, where employee and customer expectations have changed. If you’re not leveraging AI today, you are choosing to compete against it. And if you don’t enable your people with the right tools to be successful at their jobs, you run the risk of them using unsafe tools on their own. If you’re hesitant to do so because you think it will require a complete overhaul of your existing intranet, think again.

You don’t need to overhaul your tech stack to empower your employees to work more effectively and productively using AI. There are flexible and composable tools like the Coveo AI Platform that can integrate with the tools you already use, and the tangible business results you can track will be worth the investment. To learn more, visit Coveo.com.