How People team can use AI to create a more personalised, relevant and responsive employee experience

Imagine you’re in your early 20s. You’ve grown up with an iPhone, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok and all the rest of it. 

And as a result, you have a pretty high expectation about how tech should work.

Your entire life experience has conditioned you to expect to get what you want, when you want it… at the click of a button. 

In fact, you probably expect your tech to know what you want, before you know you want it.

Not only do you expect personalisation and prediction, you also expect the whole user journey to come together as a coherent, seamless, on-brand experience.

So when you get your first job at a hospitality business, it must feel like you’ve signed up to work in a Victorian cotton mill! You’re filling out paper forms. The tech seems really clunky. None of the systems seem to talk to each other or seem to know who you are. You have to keep jumping between different apps. You even find yourself entering the same data twice! 😱

The truth is, most HR tech in hospitality just doesn’t live up to our expectations as digital consumers (and here’s the kicker… our expectations as consumers are just about to take another leap forward as we experience more and more of the latest generation of AI firsthand).

In large part, that’s because it wasn’t built with the user experience of an employee experience in mind! The last generation of HR Tech came from a ‘one size fits all’ era of people management. The tech was built to enable HR teams to achieve compliance and control more efficiently and reliably. It wasn’t built to improve the employee experience of frontline teams. Frankly, they were just expected to like it or lump it.

But I think we’re about to enter into a slightly weird labour market where this disregard for employee experience is no longer viable.

Why?

• Jobs industries with lots of frontline ‘deskless workers’ — like hospitality, healthcare, construction and engineering — are forecast to grow over the next decade. The UK social care sector for example, needs to find another 500,000 new employees just to keep up with projected demand.
• Most of these industries are also facing the prospect that large numbers of their existing employees will retire or leave their industry in the next decade. Just as an example, 30% of the UK’s train drivers are due to retire in the next 5 years.
• From a political perspective, it looks unlikely that we’ll plug these talent gaps with mass immigration. 
• And while AI may (or may not) replace millions of white collar admin jobs, it won’t do the job of a chef, electrician or nurse.
• So the price of labour for skilled frontline jobs, will almost certainly continue to rise, even if there’s unemployment grows in other sectors of the economy.
• And so the challenge — and at the same time the huge opportunity — for hospitality companies is going to be: how do you attract, engage and retain a new generation of workers who didn’t grow up aspiring to build a career in hospitality, but who can’t find the graduate scheme opportunity they wanted in accountancy, law etc?

The hospitality companies that create the best employee experience will attract, develop and retain the best people. And that’s going to give them a huge competitive advantage in this new era.

And to do that well at scale (i.e. anything beyond 100-150 employees), you’re going to need the HR tech that enables you to do this. 

And this of course is where agentic AI comes in. Because you can get AI agents to respond to any of the data or events recorded within the system… which means you can personalise employee experiences in a way that just wasn’t possible 

So for example…

You can have an agent that guides someone through a promotion

Or the process of renewing their visa

Or returning from parental leave

You can have an agent that helps someone identify if they have some form of neurodiversity, and then modifies their employee experience accordingly

You can have agents that monitor and respond to signs that someone might have a mental health need

You can have personalised onboarding journeys, that respond to a new starter’s past experience and, their feedback and how quickly they get up to speed

You can offer personalised incentives or recognition schemes… for example, offering a discount on a kids party for employees with children under the age of 11

The key to all this is that you have to have the tech that enables you to capture and manage personalised data. And the last generation of HR tech just wasn’t built for this.

Think of all the things that really matter to your employees, like… whether they have kids or caring responsibilities, whether they’re studying outside of work, their career aspirations, what’s on their bucket list, their hobbies etc etc

How much of that data is captured on your HRIS?!

Most hospitality companies don’t even know how many vegetarians they employ.

No one is capturing the data you would want to know about an employee in order to create a more personalised experience.

Once you’ve got this data and you have an agentic system that can respond to it… the limit is really just your imagination!

If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you create a more personalised, responsive and relevant employee experience,  please book a demo call here. 

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