The AI innovations shaping the modern employee experience

Organizations are navigating unprecedented levels of complexity in today's workplace. Leaders are grappling with a widening skills gap, adapting to modern ways of working, keeping pace with relentless change, and riding a sharp learning curve on AI. These are just a few of the challenges companies must solve by innovating in order to maintain and enhance their competitive edge.

As companies focus on these immediate challenges, employee experiences can be eclipsed by productivity pressure, disruption and uncertainty. When navigating complex and unexpected headwinds generated by global economic, social and political forces, many leaders can overlook the most critical element of their success - their people, and the experiences that enable them to do their best work.

The workforce is feeling the pressure. Nearly 40% of surveyed employees globally are dealing with intensified demands to increase productivity. Lacking proper support – enhanced processes, cutting red tape or empowering employees with the right tools – key retention indicators nosedive between 10-15% for engagement, intent to stay, and wellbeing. AI tools are being rapidly adopted by employees, but only half of the AI tools they use are being provided by their employer;highlighting the imbalance between productivity pressure and corresponding enablement.

In 2025, organizational performance and adaptability will depend on leaders making faster, better decisions. They must have access to timely and relevant business intelligence that informs daily decisions. Yet, so many still are not equipped with insights into employees’ experiences that enable them to continuously improve the way work gets done in new, dynamic environments.

Top performing businesses will take an employee-centric approach to change management. In the past, top employers were able to exceed employee expectations by solely focusing on pay and benefits – while still important, today’s winning strategy requires partnering with employees to understand their needs, help them navigate change, and respond proactively to their day-to-day experience at work. AI can enhance this approach by providing deeper insights and more personalized experiences at scale.

Transformational AI tools for better employee experiences

Traditional employee listening practices must evolve to meet the needs of a modern workforce. This does not mean overloading every employee with relentless survey requests, as generative AI is deeply revolutionizing how we listen, understand, and take action to optimize the most impactful employee experiences across the organization. People leaders are eager for the HR function to become an integral part of an organization’s foundational structure to drive business growth. The pressure is on to find productivity gains in the context of an accelerating pace of change and nebulous economic conditions.

“To turn something around within 48 hours, with our fresh data, for high level executive board presentations is not something we’d been able to accomplish. We can now go beyond engagement and other scores, glean into things employees are talking about, how they feel about them in such a short timeframe.” – Kiera Connerty, Global Employee Listening & Engagement Team Lead at Allstate

As a pathway to boost productivity, moving routine or administrative tasks towards AI automation frees up HR teams to do what they do best – the more strategic and human tasks that computers can’t replicate. We found that 51% of surveyed HR professionals are using AI tools daily or weekly. 40% of HR professionals say they are using it to analyze data, but more than a quarter are personally sourcing tools themselves, rather than using those provided by their employer.

This gap illustrates the current risk and untapped opportunity that could be harnessed by further empowering HR departments. With such an appetite from HR and business leaders to use AI to simplify existing processes and get richer insights quicker, every organization has the potential to utilize historically dormant and disconnected data to generate actionable insights quickly, understand everyday experiences of diverse employees, and focus on enabling them to do their best work.

Designed with robust data privacy protections, Qualtrics^® AI is tapping into the power of leading-edge innovation, with unrivaled attention to the delicacy of employee experience tools and information. These enhancements allow HR teams to quickly realize value, understand results, and take action without needing a data analytics background. The ease of setup and high level of customization enable rapid adoption of these innovations. After rigorous testing, each of these new capabilities are available today:

• Qualtrics Assist: Dashboard AI assistant that helps analysts, managers, and company leaders get real-time answers to questions about their employee experience data, ensuring they are addressing the most critical areas to improve their team’s experience. Users can answer questions in real-time using their own voices, which, when combined with Qualtrics AI, allows them to uncover insights from results faster, consistently, and reliably.
• Comment Summaries: Transform employee open text feedback into quick, smart actions that save HR and leaders time, while keeping things anonymous to boost trust and satisfaction in the workplace. Automatically aggregate and summarize employee feedback into clear, concise themes, helping you quickly identify patterns and sentiment trends across your team. This removes the manual work of sorting through individual comments, while protecting employee confidentiality and avoiding biased interpretations.
• Response Clarity: A crucial tool for organizations looking to maximize the value of every survey interaction. By intelligently prompting respondents for additional detail, it transforms feedback into actionable insights, enhancing the overall effectiveness of customer and employee surveys. In a controlled study, the conversational feedback feature demonstrated a 35-40% increase in the volume of valuable open-text data collected, resulting in more detailed and unique insights.

How To Unlock a Next-Level Employee Experience With AI

Passive listening has gained widespread acceptance in the workforce. Our data shows 59% employees say they are comfortable with passive listening, a gain of three percentage points from 2024. Employers are continuing to prioritize employee feedback with 48% of employees saying they were solicited for feedback, compared to just 35% saying the same the previous year.

Insights from the Qualtrics 2025 Employee Experience Trends research show that the more people use AI, the more positive they are about how it impacts the nature of their jobs. To successfully unlock the productivity potential of AI, companies need a strategic plan to support employees as they adapt to new tasks and a professional future that leverages AI to create higher quality work in less time.

An AI-enhanced, modern experience management practice won’t be consolidated overnight, but its inherent value cannot be understated. As experience management skills mature and the Qualtrics Experience Management platform gains new capabilities, AI has an important role to play.
With AI-powered capabilities, people teams can proactively summarize employee feedback at scale to discover trends, surface more meaningful insights through interactive analysis of data, and identify which actions to take to improve specific experiences.