The Newest Tool in HR's Garden

How Drift’s People Team is leaning in and learning to leverage AI to build a more engaging culture.

What’s On My AI-Mind

AI tools have the power to help us build better workplaces. Working in HR is like tending a garden: we have to think about creating the air, sunlight, and space for people to feel fulfilled and engaged at work. The goal is for our employees to feel inspired and empowered in their current roles as well as in their professional development. This part of my job is more exciting than ever because AI and GPT tools introduce innovative ways to approach HR challenges and enable us to provide our entire organization with new learning opportunities and resources. From accelerating the recruitment process to charting fulfilling career paths to powering individualized wellness tools, AI and GPT technology can help HR teams build more meaningful, insightful, and engaging workplaces.

AI gives us more time for creativity. Integrating AI and GPT tools in the workplace can spark creativity across all levels of an organization and ignite new opportunities for innovative strategies, problem-solving, ideas, and solutions. We have used AI to accelerate tasks that eat up employee time and energy—especially around data synthesis or collection, project management, and research. AI can empower people to focus on the uniquely human elements of their jobs.

Guardrails enable safe experimentation. We’re still in the early days of AI, which means that with the new realms of opportunity come new realms of risk. HR teams need to find a balance between providing ample space for their teams to experiment with AI and GPT—and safeguarding against known risks (like data vulnerabilities and AI biases)... plus the risks we aren’t even aware of yet.

Earlier this year, Drift drafted a generative AI policy that’s designed to evolve alongside these new technologies and always keep humans in the loop. By keeping our guardrails flexible and strong, we help ensure expectations and norms around AI are clear, define the risks as we know them today, and importantly, invite further discussion about how our team can best leverage these tools. AI and GPT will transform so much of our world—at this early stage, it’s vital we set the foundation for safe adoption and use.

AI can help your employees work smarter, grow faster, and be more engaged. Tedious tasks often achieve uninspired results; AI takes care of the mundane stuff, leaving endless room for exciting, transformative ideation. AI and GPT tools have provided HR teams with an unprecedented opportunity to design streamlined workflows centered around the most meaningful elements of their company’s work. If employees are empowered to focus on the most interesting parts of their jobs, it’ll have a ripple effect across the entire organization: projects will be more thoughtful and creative, careers will evolve in exciting ways, and the workplace will be a place of invigorating and ambitious engagement.

Engaging with AI and GPT tools allows employees to develop skills that are increasingly relevant and career-enhancing, and it supports our leadership principle of being a curious learning machine.

GPT Made This for Me: Brainstorms, Guidance… Even a Trip Itinerary

ChatGPT is my go-to AI tool. I think of it as a catch-all when I’m first approaching a complex problem because it can pull together a wide range of ideas that often lead me down the right path. In a world of endless possibilities, you just don't know what you don't know, but by using AI and GPT tools, I can quickly identify the broad strokes of an idea, so I don’t miss anything.?

I’ve used it to brainstorm about sales compensation, the employee lifecycle, and even to build an itinerary for a trip to Charleston, South Carolina.

The Single Best Thing I’ve Listened to About AI?

The Marketing AI Show from Paul Reotzer and the Marketing AI Institute has a phenomenal podcast episode on AI’s impact on education and the job market . People are afraid that AI will harm education and take away all our jobs, but what the episode explains so well is that AI is a tool, and historically, new tools improve education and improve the workplace. I truly believe that by automating a lot of the tedium, AI will help make all of our lives more productive and fulfilling.

Want to learn more about the intersection of humans and AI? Register to attend Drift’s all-new virtual event, Converge , on December 5-6.