The HR software company Lattice announced an AI agent last week aimed at providing support to HR teams and all employees. The company has embedded AI across its talent and payroll platform to speed up employee requests, offer coaching support to employees and managers, and provide insights to senior leadership around talent strategy.
"Understanding your benefits, understanding your career trajectory, understanding what you need to do to get promoted, understanding what options you have if your family member needs you to help care for them," CEO Sarah Franklin explained. "That is the crux of having the Lattice AI agent for HR."
With AI offerings entering the market at the consumer and enterprise level, new agentic-style upgrades that software companies have begun to offer are addressing the adoption challenge of the user experience. Typing prompts is a lot simpler than knowing a coding language as the skill set needed to benefit from the latest technology.
Lattice is employing the prompt format to embed AI into its platform experience.
"It's as simple as a search bar," Franklin said. "It's a behavior that people are used to in the consumer world. You make that seem simple, approachable, and then grounding all the answers in the contextual data around them," such as users' department, geography or job level.
Consulting and technology analysts have previously told Newsweek that use-cases in HR have focused on administrative and recruiting tasks. Longtime consultant Josh Bersin shared that some companies have call centers to handle inbound employee questions. Franklin also noted this expenditure on HR help desks and software to handle employee cases.
Lattice's AI agent is heavily aimed at addressing the burden HR teams face fielding these questions about benefits and other company policies, and other questions whose answers can be found in a centrally located document.
"It seems like a full-time job to just manage your notifications that come in," Franklin explained. "And you have to spend a lot of time hunting and pecking through systems just to find basic answers to questions."
These documents, such as employee handbooks, onboarding guides, process documentation and other training materials, are typically an output of heavy investment from legal, internal communications, L&D and leadership teams, among others. The systems informing the AI can include Microsoft, Google and other common workplace communication and collaboration suites, such as intranets.
"There's a lot of investment in the policies and time in managing the knowledge-based resources, keeping them current and accurate," Franklin said. "It's a lot of resource, it's a lot of time, it's also a lot of content."
The Lattice platform will also offer career-path guidance to employees and coaching guidance for managers.
"First-time managers often need help and guidance," Franklin said.
The Lattice AI platform proactively offers templates for "helping managers do these basic things, like your one-on-ones, giving feedback, assessing performance," she added. It answers questions from employees about career paths, promotion criteria, taxes, benefits and even basics on finance or math.
"The fear of judgment is a very interesting human characteristic, which makes it hard to seek out coaching, and hard to get real coaching," Franklin said. "Being able to use AI, people fear less that they're going to be judged…the AI is very literal and logical. You can practice, you can get feedback that doesn't feel as hurtful."
Franklin sees AI applications in HR technology allowing for further customization of the employee experience and more agile organizations.
"It's going to get even more personalized, and companies are going to be better able to plan and shape their workforce. Right now, we're designing our budgets for workforce with a pretty blunt budget system," she explained. "Being able to take this data and get even more nuanced in our correlations and really precise in our hiring…that's what I really see as a big opportunity in the next year."
The promise of AI and other technology to alleviate the administrative burden of HR work and allow staff to be more strategic about the workforce aligns with modernized HR and management practices. Businesses also have an impetus to be less resistant to change and more resilient.
In workforce planning, Franklin sees Lattice AI delivering insights for senior leaders that perhaps an engagement survey or other employee data would not be able to surface. With the right information, she said it can proactively assess the needs of the company and allow faster communication around hiring cycles and what skills the organization is looking for.
Capturing information from employee requests, career coaching, management coaching and other available data, companies and their teams can deploy their talent more effectively.
"The more that teams become built dynamically around the business need, instead of created statically around a functional need, you're going to see a lot more speed and performance and innovation happen," Franklin said. "If all you do is one thing all the time, you don't build as much diversity in your skill sets, and you're also not applying your skill sets as well where they may be needed."
