Employee Experience and Buyer Readiness for an AI-Driven Future

This IDC Market Perspective discusses employee experience and buyer readiness for an AI-driven future. Left to their own devices, many businesses seek to measure the impact of AI based on automation norms like process standardization, FTE cost equivalences, time saved, and error reduction. The AI metric landscape includes components of human performance relative to the human-agent partnership. If workforce training around AI-driven business transformation does not keep pace with the changes AI bring, employee disengagement and resulting attrition and skills loss will cut companies off at the knees before AI can ever reach any level of replacement value or accurate replacement capacity. Consequently, AI transformation can and should be tied to changing rates of employee engagement even before assistant, advisor, and agent adoption and partnership."AI transformation is being evaluated by many executive leadership teams through the same lens as digital automation," says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager, Employee Experience at IDC. "Technology vendors need to evolve their client partnership styles and requirements to get deeper in the weeds on business transformation around AI. Vendors need to define measures, metrics, and protocols to transform client businesses from static process definitions to dynamic orchestration. As the shift takes place, they need to instruct clients to include human metrics like engagement directly in the measurement of the AI success story."