As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the modern workplace, forward-thinking organizations are looking beyond mere efficiency gains—they are asking how technology can actively enrich the employee experience. From streamlining repetitive workflows and fueling continuous learning to acting as a copilot that frees up valuable time for mentorship, collaboration, and human connection, AI is redefining what it means to support a thriving workforce. We asked leading companies how they are integrating AI into their culture while keeping human relationships at the center of their strategy. Here is how top workplaces are balancing technological innovation with a deeply human-first approach.
How is your company using AI to enhance employee experience and engagement?
At Motive, we use AI to help employees spend less time on repetitive work and more time on judgment, creativity, and collaboration. Employees use Glean to search across internal knowledge and connected workplace systems, get contextual answers, and build agents for recurring workflows; Google Gemini supports brainstorming, drafting, summarization, and research; and Fellow helps capture meeting notes, decisions, and action items so teams can follow through more consistently. We also support adoption through AI enablement programs, hands-on learning forums, office hours, and the #ai-at-motive Slack community, where employees share practical use cases and agents. The goal is not AI for its own sake—it is to make work more connected, informed, and efficient while preserving the autonomy and ownership that help people do their best work.
How are you ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces the human elements of employee experience, like manager relationships or peer connections?
We design AI as a copilot, not a replacement for human relationships. AI can surface context, summarize feedback, or reduce coordination overhead, but people remain responsible for the decisions and conversations that shape the employee experience. We treat AI-generated outputs as a starting point for human judgment, with transparency, appropriate review, and clear accountability—especially when an issue affects an employee’s growth, performance, or well-being. In practice, AI should create more capacity for meaningful one-on-one conversations, coaching, peer recognition, collaboration, and mentorship—including programs such as Motive’s Bridge Program—not less. Our broader Employee Dialogue approach reinforces the same principle: listen with intent, act with purpose, and stay accountable to results.
Check out Motive’s careers page here!
How is your company using AI to enhance employee experience and engagement?
We want our employees to be part of the testing and iteration on how they apply AI to their actual work. We use an ‘Enable, Run, Invent’ framework to ensure every AI application directly correlates to a specific business need versus us mandating the use of AI just because it’s available to them. We Enable our people by empowering them to use AI responsibly, independently and effectively; we Run our operations more efficiently and accelerate improvements through AI; and we Invent new ways to solve complex energy problems and grow with AI. By focusing on these friction points, we enhance engagement by giving employees tools that provide immediate, tangible value in their daily tasks, rather than layering on technology for technology’s sake.
From a different lens focused more on practical usage of AI, we have created our own Generative AI (GenAI) application to help our teams be more productive, where employees can ask free-form questions, extract insights from complex documents, and perform other day-to-day duties using Large Language Models. We are also using AI to deliver a more seamless candidate experience across job search, application, and interview scheduling. By automating key steps, we are reducing friction, accelerating time to action, and giving candidates greater flexibility in how they engage with us. Automated scheduling alone has reduced manual coordination and saved time, while AI-powered capabilities support multilingual interactions, conversational applications, and faster answers to candidate questions. Underpinning these innovations is a strong commitment to responsible AI, with human oversight and governance practices focused on transparency, fairness, privacy, security, and compliance, helping ensure an experience that is both effective and trusted. With AI, our talent acquisition team gains more time for high-touch, interpersonal engagement at the moments that matter most.
How are you ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces the human elements of employee experience, like manager relationships or peer connections?
We ensure AI acts as a force multiplier for human interaction rather than a substitute. Our design principle is simple: automate where we can to deepen impact and empower human interactions. For instance, we’ve introduced an AI tool called ‘Coach V’ to help our People Leaders navigate complex challenges while allowing them to double down on the irreplaceable human elements: mentorship, empathy and meaningful peer connection. This philosophy extends to the entire workforce. We use AI to automate the routine, giving them back the one thing they need most: time. For us, AI doesn’t replace the expertise our people bring to the table; it removes the friction from our day-to-day work, allowing every employee to focus on the high-value collaboration and complex problem-solving that drives our growth and performance.
Check out GE Vernova’s careers page here!
How is your company using AI to enhance employee experience and engagement?
At N-able, we’re leveraging AI to help N-ablites build new skills and work more efficiently. Through our N-ablite Learning courses, such as a Getting Started with AI, AI Fireside Chats, and AI 101/201 courses, N-ablites are building practical knowledge and tools to confidently leverage AI in their roles.
How are you ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces the human elements of employee experience, like manager relationships or peer connections?
We view AI as a way to support – not substitute – human connection. While AI helps enable learning and productivity, we continue to invest in leadership development, mentoring, onboarding experiences, recognition programs, and opportunities for N-ablites to connect with leaders and colleagues, ensuring relationships remain at the center of the N-ablite experience.