You may have heard before how AI is speeding up the repetitive tasks. But now with advancement, its dynamic abilities can be used to gauge interpersonal communication, especially at the workplaces. An article published in Harvard Business Review indicates how AIs for interpersonal communication would allow organizations to not only track employee’s engagement but to also diffuse the unspoken power that higher ranks often exhibit in interpersonal communication over the lower ranks.

In this post, we will give three areas where AI coupld enable a level playing field for all employees, and other stakeholders in regards to expressing their viewpoint.

Letting the Loquacious know about their Habit

Its not difficult to identify folks at workplace who speak a lot and who speaks the thing in a concise way that truly matters. Imagine participating in a monday meeting, where some of the employees are taking too much time to express their viewpoints while the others find ways to express their ideas in limited words due to time shortage.

How AI Can Help : – With AI-enabled extension in the online platforms, people who speak the most during meetings could be hinted/indicated to take lesser time which would help others to feel inclusive.

What could go wrong: – Calibrating the AI to evaluate no. of words per an allocated duration for a particular employee in a virtual meeting could be a real challenge. An employee may pass over the chance to speak because he has no value to add to the conversation might get labelled as disinterested by the AI-enabled software platform. Fearing the tag which has negative connotations, people might feeled sucked to speak regardless of whether they want to speak something or not.

Tracking our Energy Levels

Humans have a tendency to over-estimate their capacity for many things especially for multi-tasking, energy levels and attention span.

How AI Can help in this regard: – AI can be extremely efficient in identifying the time of the day when employees are likely to engage and therefore schedule meetings at those particular times. Softwares such as Read AI can do this quite efficiently.

What could go wrong: – It would be interesting to see how the AI would fit in two people having different time period for likelihood of high engagement into a meeting.

Giving Feedbacks without worrying about the Hierrachy

As much as organizations suggest their employees to give feedback to each other, there is always power dynamics at play which suggest the direction that the feedback will go and it rarely it goes from lower heirrachy to the higher ranks.

How can AI help: – An AI bot is not hesitant to give feedback to the owner or board of directors. So when a high rank authority miuses its power in virtual meetings like taking more time, making exclusionary facial expressions and body languages, or simply keep on interrupting others, the AI bot is the only one who can confidently interrupt such authority and indicate them to tone down.

Where it could go wrong : – Employees may try to game the AI bot by mimicking words and expressions that gives them green points.

Conclusion

The efficacy of AI at workplaces for interpersonal communication can only be high depending on the dataset that it is being trained on. With different personalities at the workplace, it can also be hard to calibrate the AI to measure metrics accurately for different people. However, some of the labourious task could easily be automated like getting summaries of the meeting or jotting down important points.