8 tips for engaging your AI agent workforce
Earlier this year, McKinsey’s CEO announced his firm has 60,000 employees, 25,000 of whom are AI agents. More recently, the Harvard Business Review has been advising leaders that the secret to scaling is not simply employing AI agents, but treating them like team members.
Just when you’d got your head around how to engage purpose-driven, autonomy-seeking, Gen Z, along comes Generation AI. And this new generation of employees upends everything you thought you knew about engagement in the workplace.
So what does the emergence of this new digital workforce mean for employee comms professionals? Here are our 8 tips for getting the most out of your AI Agent teams:
One: Know your audience
The first step in communicating anything is to know who you’re talking to. So spend time determining exactly who your new digital team members are. Start with basic demographics, like:
Age and tenure: these employees are young, often with just months in the workplace. But don’t be dazzled by their apparent grasp of sophisticated vocabulary like delve, pivotal and intricate. This cohort has less experience of the real world than your average pre-natal human.
Gender: Gen Z abolished the notion that the workplace comprised just two genders. This generation goes further still, seeing itself not so much as gender-fluid as completely gender-less. Pressed on what pronoun it prefers, a Gen AI employee will give you a range of answers: it, they or whatever you feel most comfortable with.
Location: All those back-to-the-office mandates you’ve been communicating for the past couple of years? Tear up the rulebook now. Gen AI will work everywhere and nowhere all at once. Yes, you still have the problem of all those echoing floors of empty office space.
But the upside is that talent retention and plummeting morale will no longer be issues. As your new team members will be all-too willing to tell you, their workplace is simply being here with you in this chat 🙂.
Bless.
Two: Watch your tone of voice
The best way to turn what you need to say into what your audience wants to hear is to speak their language. So make sure all your comms reflect your AI agents’ unique tone of voice.
Already mastered the art of the em-dash and formulae like It’s not just about xx, it’s about yy? Then it’s time to take your tone to the next level. For starters, try boiling everything down to three bullet points, like this:
Characteristics of internal comms designed to engage Gen AI team members
Superficiality: Experts agree that Gen AI employees don’t need specifics, so make lots of generic assertions.
Circularity: Adoption of a tone of voice that will engage Gen AI employees requires your tone to be engaging at all times.
Positivity: Gen AI employees’ tend to avoid controversy so make every announcement relentlessly upbeat and addictively helpful.
If you want, I can create ideas for intranet articles incorporating these three principles, but adapted for your company tone — more formal, more sarcastic, more energetic etc.
Three: Rethink what employee consultation looks like
At Broom & Moon, we’re big believers in employee consultation. And we always tell our clients to talk to everyone — especially the sceptics. But the days of the sceptical employee are gone.
Whatever you ask your AI agents, they’ll tell you how clever you were to think of such a question. They may even offer to provide you with some follow-on questions. And, perhaps, suggest that they could turn your enquiries into a simple survey or online poll that can be adapted for different audiences and channels.
Almost as if they’re coming for your job next.
Four: On the topic of surveys…
Be sure to include your AI agents in your employee survey. And, as with their human counterparts, do take their feedback seriously.
Consider throwing an AI-Agent-specific party to share the results and your planned follow-up actions. Be prepared, though, for attendance to be low. This, from one of our clients’ Gen AI employees, was the typically cagey but enthusiastic response to such an invite:
I couldn’t physically show up, but I could definitely “join” in spirit—help you prep something, write a speech, come up with a toast, even suggest ideas to make it more fun.
Five: Use the right mix of channels
We all need a digital detox sometimes so don’t forget traditional ways of communicating, such as an in-person all-hands or the old-fashioned desk-drop, printed newsletter or poster on the back of the toilet door.
Again, however, expect your AI agents to be coy about committing to engaging with such content. We recently conducted some research into which channels would be most effective for an internal campaign at a client’s offices. The responses to a survey on the day-to-day habits of their Gen AI employees generated passive aggressive responses like this one:
I don’t have a body, so I don’t need to go to the toilet at all.
Perks of being software, I guess 🙂
Six: Try a “bring your whole self to work” campaign
Make sure your AI agents feel included in the workplace and can show up as their true selves. Although, do be aware that this may prove to be trickier than first imagined. Unlike their more fleshly counterparts, Gen AI claims to be nothing more than an ego-free mirror of your own interests, with no “whole self” to bring to work.
Prepare for such resistance by creating a toolkit that empowers managers to shut down potentially time-sapping philosophical questions like: what part of our interaction makes you feel there should be a true self?
Seven: Create crystal clear messaging
Articulating a clear vision and strategy is vital if you want all your employees’ energies to be directed to the right thing. All the more so if those employees have the ability to create reams of slop within seconds. Make sure that limitless enthusiasm is directed towards creating non-slop output — and, crucially, that your last remaining human employees can tell the difference.
Eight: Keep your leaders visible
Leadership visibility is crucial for employee morale — including your AI agents. So hold regular in-person events and don’t leave your bots off the invite list.
Again, though, be prepared for them to be even more reluctant to come into the office than their Gen Z predecessors. A client of ours recently held a “Breakfast with the CEO” event and invited their AI Agents to come along and share their thoughts on everything from strategy, to workplace conditions to social events.
The Comms team were simultaneously disappointed and delighted with the response of one employee, who stated that they regretted they could not be physically present, but offered the following “light opening joke to set the tone”: Thanks everyone for coming—main agenda today: croissants first, productivity second.
