Sep 17, 2023

iTWire Sunday, 17 September 2023 15:34 Culture Amp boosts employee voices with Google AI; selects GCP for ethical commitment Featured 0 Australian-born, globally-used, employee engagement platform Culture Amp has set its mission as amplifying the experience and impact of more than 100m workers around the world. It’s taken on Google’s Vertex AI to help HR professionals get to the crux of what workers are saying - and says it chose Google for its ethical commitment. Culture Amp was founded in Australia, but enjoyed early success with fast-growth tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, expanding from there to all kinds of industries and geographies. “We’re used by the who’s who of Silicon Valley,” said Culture Amp founder and CTO Doug English (pictured). The company's mission is to help organisations build category-defining cultures by giving a voice to employees at all levels, and ensuring that voice is heard by management. Culture Amp started life with employee engagement surveys and expanded to include coaching, development plans, employee performance, and other modules that all interconnect to help a business draw out insights, and identify recurring patterns whether good or bad, all with the goal of helping that business continually improve its employee relations and thus its internal culture. Today, there are more than 6,500 customers using Culture Amp across the world, and while the business is based in Melbourne, it’s an Aussie success story with 60% of its customers in the USA. Culture Amp itself employs 1000 people, with 50% in the ANZ region, and the other half across the US, London, and Berlin. With 6,500 customers that have a combined 100,000,000 employees using the platform, you’d be right to think that’s a lot of data. And data is the cornerstone of artificial intelligence. AI is, today, as the cloud once was and, decades before, the Web. Now the web is mainstream, the cloud is the new way of working, and it’s AI that’s taken centre stage as the next big revolution in computing. Yet, for many it’s a no-brainer you need an AI strategy but figuring out exactly what to do with AI is the challenge. If you find AI is a solution in search of a problem it’s possible you’re thinking too hard. "Start small and think big," English says. And that’s exactly what his approach to embracing AI was. “The most common, and therefore underrated, use case for generative AI is summarisation. Start there, and then look at more adventurous ideas.” From here, English says, you can build your capability internally. “I have been so impressed by how hands-on the team has been at Culture Amp in working with Google to help us jointly develop a robust capability for generative AI,” he said. "As much as there are lots of people out there talking about generative AI, there are very few with actual practical experience on building a product that uses it.” Why Google, though? The answer is simple. For English, it was essential not to sacrifice responsible AI and ethics. “As keen as the Culture Amp team was to launch the product to market, we took intense care in making sure what we released met customer’s high standards,” he said. Specifically, standards that ensured trustworthy, unbiased, and secure generative AI. It was non-negotiable for English and his team that any AI applications they created did not leak data, did not make things up - and could trace any results back to source data, and did not embed or propagate bias. "You can't take short-term opportunistic approaches to this technology. You need a rigorous operating model and ethical principles to create value in a way that doesn’t endanger your customers or their employees’ wellbeing,” English said. "It was GCP's commitment to responsible AI that gave us the confidence to use their platform.” Google has much to say about responsible AI , and the deep responsibility incumbent on those leveraging this technology. On stage at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasised this while speaking about GCP’s cloud innovations. “As exciting as the AI opportunity is, we have to be clear of production challenges. Hence Google Cloud is committed to responsible AI with safety, security, and privacy at the core,” he said. With both a suitable problem and a cloud provider identified, Culture Amp set to work using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI as the foundation of their generative AI solution. By summarising tens of thousands of employee survey comments into topics and actionable insights, HR professionals globally could save hundreds of hours ordinarily spent analysing employee feedback. An important part of the solution was that the HR administrators could trace feedback back to summarised insights and also correct the results for potential bias and organisation context while ensuring the employee’s anonymity is maintained. It's not Culture Amp's first foray into AI; English explains the product has been using some aspects of AI already, particularly around analysing comments and looking for themes. However, this was from the team’s own internal work and hand-rolled models. Their ability to apply generative AI accelerated dramatically with the partnership with Google Cloud, which brought with it a raft of large language models. The Vertex AI capabilities and models meant that within only four months of commencing the partnership, Culture Amp had explored the approach, developed and tested it, and was ready to preview it. "With tens of thousands of employees, even if they only put in one comment, there will still be a vast amount of comments,” English explains. “So HR admins are used to skim reading quickly, or to spending days and days reading comments and categorising them. The ability to bring actionable comments and synthesise themes up-front means admins can take action much faster than they otherwise could.” From the Google side, Culture Amp was one of only three companies selected in Australia for early generative AI access, according to Google Cloud ANZ director and CTO Matt Zwolenski. Before Google Cloud made its own generative AI work generally available, “we’d done months of testing with Culture Amp,” he said. “They were willing to work with us as we rolled out the product, and we tested and worked together. It was collaborative and their feedback helped us test our product.” Going forward, Culture Amp has more plans. "The way we decide where and how to leverage AI in our platform focuses on three points,” English explained. “Building trust, keeping control, and expanding value.” "Building trust means we make sure to keep data safe and secure. We must build confidence in the results we present to the user and be able to show the workings of how we got to the generative result. Ultimately, the output of generative AI is no one right answer - you can summarise in many ways, but if the end-user can see how you got to the outcome, it will build trust.” "Summarisation of comments is a great example of an AI use-case; it will save hundreds and hundreds of hours by presenting employee feedback in a well-structured way.” If you're wondering how to apply AI to your business, English has a tip for you. Partner with Google - or the right provider - especially when it comes to LLMs or large-language models. “The amount of data required to build good, strong models means we will see a few very large organisations able to provide the platforms and models to drive solutions that work. For organisations like Culture Amp, partnering is a wise thing to do. Work with experts, and have experts internally able to work with the Google experts,” he says. "Organisations making shifts prior to Vertex AI were building their own generative AI strategy, using their own engineering resources,” English says. “Now the build is an API call inside Vertex and it takes off a heavy load not having to build the tooling. We can focus on where we add value to customers.” The Culture Amp generative AI component to summarise feedback will be released later this year. The partnership began only in April, working through evaluations, discussions, security architecture, exploring Google’s secure approach to protecting data, and then an internal pilot and engineering effort. It will be provided at no extra cost to customers using the management engagement survey module. “We will then look to bring AI capabilities into more parts of the platform. We definitely see AI as one of the tools in the toolkit,” English says. "When looking at product capabilities, I’d expect AI to end up in all of them.” Read 5 times It's all about Webinars. Marketing budgets are now focused on Webinars combined with Lead Generation. If you wish to promote a Webinar we recommend at least a 3 to 4 week campaign prior to your event. The iTWire campaign will include extensive adverts on our News Site itwire.com and prominent Newsletter promotion https://itwire.com/itwire-update.html and Promotional News & Editorial. 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