An AI avatar interviewed me: Empathy in an age of AI

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This week, Jack Ryan posted a video of an AI bot interviewing him - 

An AI bot interviewed me

Ryan's face, during the snippet, is a mixture of disbelief and dismay.  And the comments to the post were more of the same:

  • Can't get more dehumanizing than that.  You'r not even worth an HR managers time. Thats what it says

  • I would immediately end the call and send a “thanks but no thanks” to the hiring manager

  • I hate it here 😭

  • Tell me your company doesn't value their employees without telling me it doesn't.

Ryan's post was not just a one-off - as organizations rush to embrace AI, they are adapting new technologies in all areas of their business.

This AI-interview bot offering from Tengai runs with the tagline - 

AI - make every candidate feel special

Which feels more than a bit ironic - especially in light of the energetic, less-than-special reactions that people seem to have in encountering AI in the midst of a fragile, disruptive life moment (being in the midst of a job search).

AI & human-centric skills
Every time we talk about AI, we are necessarily talking about human-centric skills.  As we ponder what tasks/capabilities that we can/should offload to artificial intelligence we are, by necessity, talking about what we should not offload - what are the tasks, the interactions, the capabilities that we want delivered to us from other humans?

These are the capabilities that we will be training on/optimizing in our people over the next decade.  They are the skills that we will be willing to pay a price-premium for in the midst of an increasingly digitized+disembodied marketplace.  

Empathy and connection matter more than ever.  And it isn't just me saying it in my empathy newsletter - check out these recent data points on connection/belonging at work -

First, the hard stuff.  Employees who rated themselves as low on the belonging scale at work had:

  • 77% more stress

  • 109% more burnout

  • 153% more loneliness

  • 158% more anxiety and depression

They then looked at connected workplaces, which had great outcomes both for the individuals that worked there but also for the company as a whole. 

Connected work places:

  • Received 32% higher ratings than their competitors

  • Were 14 times more likely to be named on a “best places to work” list

  • Were 25% more likely to be recommended by current employees to their friends.

You can read the rest of the data from the Forbes article here

What can you do - stoplight check-ins
Where can you start in building this culture of belonging?  A great place to begin is through utilizing the stoplight check-in.

As I work with organizations of all different sizes, across industries and around the world, this is one of the stickiest tools for building trust and laying a foundation for empathy at work.

At the start of meetings/interactions, invite your teammates to rate the energy that they are bringing to the interaction:

  • Red - I'm here, but it is hard right now

  • Yellow - I'm here, but there are some things that are humming in the background

  • Green - Feeling good/ready to go

This will give you a helpful sense of where people are; if someone is red or yellow, perhaps give them some space to ease into the meeting without asking for a ton of interaction at the start.

Follow up with your reds/yellows afterwards - "You said you were red today, is there anything you would like to talk about and/or that we should shift with some of your deliverables?"

Empathy and connection are a skill - you can learn
Organizations will continue to learn and make blunders when it comes to AI applications (like the tone-deaf interview bot).

But the most forward-thinking organizations are already reading the tea leaves and proactively skill-ing up their teams in human-centric skills.