Employees Will Keep Answering Surveys If You Act on What They Say

JD Peterson:

Survey fatigue is a slight myth. I think what people have is not survey fatigue, but lack of action fatigue. If you survey people, if I’m asked to give feedback and I give feedback and I don’t see anything happen, don’t ask me again.

Right? I tire of that fast, and I don’t. And what that comes out as is stop surveying, right? So it comes across as survey fatigue.

Steve Smith:

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Work Tech Weekly. I'm Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap.

At a time when HR leaders are under pressure to adopt AI, it's hard to check how well these models understand people. The standard AI benchmarks test things like coding and math. They say almost nothing about whether a model can read an employee comment and grasp what sits behind it. And the models answer with far more certainty than their analysis supports. When the recommendations land on real people, that should worry anyone buying these tools.

My guest today is JD Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer at Perceptyx. Perceptyx built its name on employee listening. Now it's focused on turning that feedback into action. JD is the former Chief Growth Officer at Culture Amp and has served as a CEO, so he looks at marketing with the whole business in mind.

We talk about why Perceptyx published a benchmark showing where AI struggles with employee feedback. We also get into why a fluent answer so often gets mistaken for understanding.

JD thinks survey fatigue has been misdiagnosed. And he has strong views on where AI outreach in go-to-market is hurting brands.

If you're buying or selling AI for the workplace, this is a useful check on how much to trust what it tells you.

Let's get into it.

JD, welcome to the podcast.

JD Peterson:

Thank you, Steve. Nice to see you and happy Friday.

Steve Smith:

Happy Friday. Good to be talking to you. So, you know, let’s kind of jump right in. You know, you’re Chief Marketing Officer at Perceptyx. You’ve been there long enough to know what the lay of the land is and where everything is. You know, you’re familiar with kind of the employee engagement category at a pretty deep level.

What surprised you most about being at Perceptyx versus marketing that you’ve done before?

JD Peterson:

Yeah. Yeah. Good place to start. Probably what surprised me is the lack of surprises. Not to go, like, super cliche on the jump here, but, you know, I tend to be one of those people who, at the end of the day, kind of marketing is marketing, and I think across domains, the similarities definitely outweigh the differences.

And, you know, again, I’ll go really cliche on you. At the end of the day it’s still, you know, right message to the right person, right time, you know, that sort of thing. But I’ll give you an answer. Maybe I’ll give you two forms of an answer. One, as you said, I have been in the employee engagement, employee listening space for getting close to a decade, kind of on and off, and when I first started there, a lot of the marketing was around educating people to either do this or how to do it, you know, without having to go to kind of the old school expensive kind of consulting models and that sort of thing. So actually using technology for it, there’s a lot of education. Now everybody’s doing it.

Everybody knows it. It’s kind of table stakes everywhere. So I think now we’re moving on to, you know, having to really focus on differentiators, you know, what makes us different than others out there. And really the so what, right? Okay, now we know how to listen. What do we do with it? You know, and really putting the emphasis there versus originally it was just, like, a lot about listening.

I’ll maybe throw one more comment on as compared to other domains I’ve worked in that are maybe outside of the employee space. One thing, I don’t know, maybe surprised me or, you know, maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but this one’s full of people, you know, and so the people matters a lot in addition to just the technology.

In some spaces I’ve been, we can really just hammer the feeds and speeds and the features. I think this one, who the company is, the trust, the people, that stuff matters a lot. We have to market that. And then I think this audience in HR and people, you know, I know we live in, like, a soundbite culture, but they’ll dig in and read, like, they’ll dig in and wanna understand and learn in, I don’t know, frankly, bigger ways than I’ve seen in other domains, so.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, to double click on employee engagement really quick. I think that, you know, like you, I’ve got some background in the space. And I think that over the past few years, you know, especially entering the AI era, we’ve seen things flip around a little bit where I don’t think employee engagement, employee experience has been a priority for a lot of employers.

You’ve seen a lot of layoffs, and I think when you look at, like, the latest Gallup numbers, you know, employee engagement’s taken a bit of a hit. Do you feel like maybe we’re coming out the other end of that cycle and that there’s an awareness on the part of employers that, oh yeah, you know what? Maybe we do need to be thinking about employee engagement in a way that we haven’t been for a few years.

JD Peterson:

I think the smart ones are coming back to it quick and maybe even leaning in further. I mean, one, like, you know, the layoffs and those things are definitely hitting the news and they’re real, and I don’t wanna make any light of that. But you’re also seeing a lot of those companies almost immediately turn around and do a bunch of rehiring, right?

So, you know, one, you know, you kind of gotta, you know, look through some of the noise and get to the details of what’s really happening. But I think that with this wave of AI, with this wave of innovation, with this crazy rapid pace that we’re all sort of dealing with at work, I mean, no time more important than ever to really lean into those employees you have, make, you know, whether it’s reskilling and upskilling, right?

Everyone’s having to learn this new stuff and at a crazy rate. So I think that’s more important than ever. And making sure that, you know, the employees you have are, you know, staying up to date with everything going on and are learning the things that they’re gonna need to survive into the next kind of years and decades.

So, yeah, I think it’s critical, and frankly, there’s almost nothing more valuable right now than an employee who actually knows how to leverage and use the new technology, use AI, use the new tools. Few things more important than that. Companies don’t wanna lose those folks. So paying attention to what they’re saying and the experience you’re providing, you know, as important as ever.

Steve Smith:

So, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders. You have a bit of a different resume than a lot of people who are in the big marketing chair. You’re really a growth guy at heart. So, like, you know, just a, you know, a few of the stops in your career. You ran all of go-to-market at Culture Amp, you know, sales, CS, RevOps, the whole schmear, then you were a CEO.

And so, you know, now kind of getting back to, you know, just focusing on the CMO chair, how do you think that’s benefited the way that you look at marketing and is translating into how you’re approaching marketing at Perceptyx?

JD Peterson:

Tremendously. Obviously I don’t know any other way than the path that I took and the background that I had. But I find it to be my greatest asset, and the greatest benefit to the work I do is having broad experience. You didn’t even mention, but early in my career I was even a product guy, right?

So I was on that side of the house, but I think having that diversity of experience and understanding of kind of the complete or the total business benefits me every day, all day, and I think gives me, frankly, an advantage over a lot of my peer group. I think that the common path is, right, somebody rises up through, frankly, not even just marketing, but one slice of marketing.

They’re doing the Google Ads, then they’re running demand gen overall, and they just kind of stay on that, you know, sort of path up to the top. But marketing is a very broad and sort of mixed sport, if you will. There’s a lot of aspects to it. And the way it fits and complements and sits and works with all the other functions in the business is just a critical part of being successful in marketing.

And so I think having that background, having the empathy with what others are going through, having the knowledge and experience of other parts of the business, I think has helped me tremendously. And, you know, I think the average tenure of a CMO is, like, the worst of all executives, and I’m probably about on what the number is for here at Perceptyx.

Hopefully we’ll live past that. But I honestly do think that, gosh, I wonder if there’s actually data on this, but I think those who have had broader backgrounds, those, you know, at least just in my limited experience, even beyond myself, tend to outlast that benchmark. And I think maybe just, you know, some of that is just having the knowledge, having the experience, those sort of, I don’t know, wherewithal of how other parts work in the business. I don’t know, maybe helping that along.

That’s just, like, a theory that maybe I’m making up, but it sure feels relevant to me. But yeah, only speaking from my own experience, it’s been critical to the way how I see things and how, you know, how I operate. And yeah, even doing the CEO stint or whatever, some people are like, oh, was this a step backwards?

Right. You know, maybe on the org chart, maybe on a hierarchy, I guess technically it is a step below or a step backwards from that level. But very intentional for me. It’s what I wanted to do at this stage of my career in life. It’s where I knew I’d be challenged, but I’d also be able to really focus and kind of apply all the things I’ve done in, you know, in a meaningful way.

So, yeah, I’m enjoying it.

Steve Smith:

Well, so let’s dial in and talk a little bit more specifically about what’s going on at Perceptyx. So, you know, obviously employee listening, employee, you know, engagement measurement. You know, benchmarks are very much the thing, and something that, you know, your customers are definitely dialed into.

Walk us through why Perceptyx published a benchmark showing that AI struggles to understand employee feedback, ’cause that doesn’t seem like the easiest marketing move.

JD Peterson:

Yeah, great. You’ve done your homework. I appreciate that. Yeah. PYX Labs, this is a sort of a little sub-venture we launched recently, and our first report and our first benchmark we put out, we call PYX Voice, really trying to understand how AI models are doing when it comes to understanding and helping people with areas in employee experience and employee feedback. Yeah.

Why would we do this type of thing? At its core, you know, if AI is gonna ultimately influence people decisions, we felt like we had a responsibility to understand where it’s strong and where it’s weak. We created PYX Labs because, you know, as we all know, AI is rapidly becoming a big part of how organizations understand, coach and develop their employees, and every HR leader, every leader, frankly, in a business is being asked to adopt AI.

But until now, there’s really been no objective way to evaluate how well do these models actually understand people and people issues. Really, most of the benchmarks out there when it comes to AI focus on coding or math or science or sort of reasoning, but none measured workplace understanding at all.

And our goal wasn’t to sort of prove that AI is perfect or only show the highlights or the good stuff that it did. We’re really trying to establish a quality standard. And so if we only publish the stuff that made us look good and, you know, it was kind of purely from a marketing standpoint, ultimately we’re not helping the space and we’re not helping customers make better decisions.

And frankly, I mentioned it earlier, but trust is just such a critical part of what we do and the relationship we have with our customers and really the space overall. You know, the fastest way to build that trust is not gonna be to hide the limitations. It’s gonna actually measure them openly and try to learn from ’em.

So I’d probably summarize, you know, the mission of this is not to prove AI works or even to prove our stuff’s better than someone else’s. It’s really, you know, how can we help AI reach its full potential in the workforce?

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, one of the interesting kind of specific findings was that models decline when interpreting complex human context. So, you know, beyond just the facts, it’s like, what’s the meaning behind what people say? What’s the impact then on, you know, the benefit and value prop for AI-powered listening, if that’s the case?

JD Peterson:

If you think about it, the big frontier models, the, you know, Claudes and Geminis and OpenAI things, we all know ChatGPT, they’re really smart, but they’re also somewhat generic, right? They’ve been trained on, like, all the information, right? The entire internet. And they have a lot of context, but they often lack specific context.

And what they do good today, these frontier models, is recognize patterns, summarize large volumes of qualitative input, and they really help you speed up analysis. But where it gets shaky is anything that depends on, like, organizational history, cultural nuance, competing priorities, or even just, like, reading between the lines of what an employee might be saying, right?

Because you may not have the full context of things that have happened before or things they might be referencing. So that’s where we believe human expertise is still necessary. AI makes the products better when it’s paired with an expert’s judgment instead of just trying to replace it. The best results we’ve seen, they come when AI can free up an expert’s time and attention, not from the AI just, like, purely making a call on its own.

So to us, and we think in this kind of workplace space, the concept of keeping a human in a loop, that remains relevant and applicable with these frontier models and with employee listening in general.

Steve Smith:

So you brought up a word that keeps coming up again and again in a lot of conversations, which is trust. You know, I think that the reason that’s coming up is, you know, in the AI-powered workplace, there’s still a lot of mistrust. There’s mistrust on the part of employees of, is AI really working for my benefit, or is it just learning my job enough so, you know, my company can let me go?

Or even if you trust the AI as a tool, do you trust all of the outputs? Because sometimes AI won’t tell you when it doesn’t know something, and it’s just filling in the gaps with a hallucination. So, you know, just in terms of, like, you know, trust, how is that kind of factoring into how PYX Labs is approaching not just its work, but its audience?

JD Peterson:

Yeah. No, it’s super interesting, and I think you hit on something there that, you know, the biggest issue I think people are seeing is not even the occasional hallucination or, frankly, even the major failures that make, like, the headline news. It’s confidence. And it’s trust.

And actually, one of the most interesting findings from this PYX Voice benchmark, kind of our first project with this lab, was what we call the confidence gap. Models, they’re communicating with a level of confidence. You kind of hinted on this. They’re communicating with a level of confidence that well exceeds the certainty of the actual underlying output or analysis.

And that’s especially important in HR because recommendations influence real people, right? There’s real humans at the end of this. And, you know, as I kind of said before, like, AI can be weak when it comes to having the organizational context, the competing priorities and, you know, human behaviors and those sorts of things.

And there’s this, like, I don’t know, tendency to treat, you know, because the agent or the model can, you know, speak really fluently and with confidence, people mistake that for understanding. And, you know, this whole idea of having all the organizational context, it’s a real gap for the LLMs.

So, you know, you think about when people provide feedback. They’re referencing things that don’t show up in that direct text, right? And so a model can read the words, but it may not actually understand the story behind it. So we have to be very conscious about this and the way we talk about AI with our customers.

And it’s kind of where, frankly, I think a lot of people in the overall category are maybe overselling or kind of falling short on what they’re able to actually do when it comes to AI.

Steve Smith:

So let’s talk a little bit more specifically about Perceptyx. So, I mean, you know, obviously has got some background in the space. Very well-regarded brand. And, you know, well-regarded technology. You’ve gone through this rebrand around people activation, which is beyond kind of employee listening.

You know, it’s a much bigger, you know, promise than the old positioning. So why raise the stakes on that?

JD Peterson:

Yeah, I think it probably boils down to the fact that we’re really good at employee listening, and we’re really good at helping people find insights and analyze and, you know, derive meaning, right, from all of that listening. But still, you know, we continue to see out in the space what we call the action gap.

Like, truly turning that feedback, those insights, that understanding into action, and not action for action’s sake, but action that actually drives business outcomes. Still a gap, right? Still a gap. And frankly, you know, it’s as simple as just listening to our customers, and what they were telling us constantly is, hey, like, we’re doing this stuff.

It’s great. The company, you know, gets, you know, gets value and gets meaning from these insights we’re deriving. But each year we come back and it’s sort of the same story, right? Like, maybe the numbers have gone up and down a little bit, but, you know, we kind of talk about it, we go off and do our thing, and we come back and, like, it’s not really fundamentally changing, like, the business outcomes.

And so we’ve made it our mission to fix that, right? And to really figure out how to turn these insights into meaningful action, drive sustained behavior change inside of companies that ultimately directly hits the business metrics and the business outcomes that companies are after. So that’s kind of why we did it.

The time is also, you know, with AI, with a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about on this, the, you know, the time was ripe for innovation, and the tools are out there to really take this innovation, you know, kind of to another level. So, you know, we’re jumping on that, and we’re aggressively, you know, focused on solving this problem in as, you know, innovative ways as we can.

Steve Smith:

So, you know, when you think about employee engagement, one of the frequent criticisms of it from those who don’t believe that there’s any there there is, great, you identified that there’s an engagement problem in the workforce. So what? You know, how does Perceptyx’s approach to activation, you know, get to that so what?

You know, and is it at the executive level? Is it at the line manager level? Is it at the employee level, or is it all up and down the org chart?

JD Peterson:

Yeah, look, I ultimately think it is everybody’s responsibility, and it does hit up and down the org chart. But certainly it starts with leadership. And I think that’s generally the place where a lot of focus and attention and activation can have the biggest impact. And particularly frontline managers, or kind of that true management level.

That’s where we continually see over and over that, you know, get that level, you know, performing higher, get them higher on engagement, get them better skilled, it trickles down and has tremendous impacts across the organization. We wanna help people quickly take the insights from their listening and turn that into an action plan.

So that’s sort of the first piece of it, right? We want to equip managers, executives, across the board to understand and boil down, hey, what should I go do? What’s gonna have the biggest impact on the drivers of engagement? And then I can go do, you know, with my team and my organization. Then we wanna reinforce that. We’ve got a whole system of coaching and nudges in the flow of work to really help people stay on top of this stuff, right?

Like, it can’t just be a one-time activity, right? It’s gotta stay, and you gotta keep reinforcing it. So our Activate product is really what it’s all about. You know, continuing to kind of nudge and coach people, but in the flow of work, not some separate thing they gotta go log into to remember to go do their, you know, their coaching session or follow up on their action items.

But bake that into the flow of work. That’s a huge piece of what we do. And then our latest product, Develop, is really about, you know, the thing we continue to see, too, is just the skill gap. People are struggling to ultimately teach employees, you know, what they need to stay competitive or to, you know, stay engaged or whatever it might be.

And so we’ve, you know, recently launched a pretty disruptive and revolutionary product that we think is gonna dramatically improve the way you can upskill workforces, the way employees can learn and continue to grow and improve inside of businesses. So there’s a couple of the ways.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, one thing that for me is interesting when I look at what you’re building and going to market with is that I’ve had this feeling for several years now, like, okay, I come out of research, and market research specifically, and I will take whatever survey comes across my email or just, like, oh, you know, I mean, it doesn’t matter what it is.

I’m just curious at how surveys work. But I also believe that, especially when you’re getting into employees, employees are over-surveyed, I think, and I think that there’s a lot of survey fatigue, especially when you consider there’s plenty of signals intelligence within any workplace to discover and learn the things you need to learn without actually having to ask employees. Am I thinking about it the right way, or are you seeing the same thing, or?

JD Peterson:

Somewhat. I’ll give you a couple variations. I think what I’ve continually found in this space, certainly at Perceptyx, but even in my days prior, is I think the survey fatigue is a slight myth. I think what people have is not survey fatigue, but lack of action fatigue. If you survey people, if I’m asked to give feedback and I give feedback and I don’t see anything happen, don’t ask me again.

Right? I tire of that fast, and I don’t. And what that comes out as is stop surveying, right? So it comes across as survey fatigue. But generally what we see is those companies who are really good at taking action when feedback is given, they do something about it. By the way, it’s the same thing in a one-on-one relationship with your manager, right?

If you’re giving your manager feedback and they do something with it, you see that action take place, you’re gonna keep giving feedback, right? And every time you’re asked, you’re gonna be okay with that. They don’t do anything with the feedback, it’s like, stop asking me. Right? And it’s the same way people are with companies.

So I think it is actually more of the action fatigue thing than it is pure survey fatigue. That said, you’re not wrong in that. I think the survey isn’t the be-all, end-all only answer, right? I think we do have to continue to get smart about finding other signals inside of companies and leveraging those.

I think one of the things that’s great about Perceptyx and attracted me here is we’re able to bring in data from all sorts of places, internal as well as external signals, Glassdoor ratings, what people are saying on LinkedIn, right? We can bring a lot of that stuff to bear and use that as part of the analytics and driving what the appropriate actions are as well.

So I think, yeah, I would frame the opening probably a little different, but I think, you know, the way you’re thinking about it and people wanting to get beyond just the survey are certainly true. But it’s funny, you know, even a few years ago when I was leaving a previous company and when I was joining Perceptyx, you know, you’ll sometimes hear this thing, this sort of, you know, murmur in the universe that, oh, the survey’s dead, or, yeah, we’re gonna stop surveying, or whatever.

And I don’t know, customers keep showing up at our door and buying surveys. So, like, it’s certainly not dead. It’s certainly not dead. And I think it still is an extremely valuable tool, but it shouldn’t be the only tool in your box. Yeah.

Steve Smith:

So, JD, there’s a lot of, I think, market confusion around AI as a value proposition. Certainly we’ve seen in tech broadly, and in work tech, HR tech specifically, a lot of AI washing, and it’s, you know, it’s not doing anything to clear up things for buyers. It’s just making it harder for them to understand, and they’re just treating it as noise. How do you go to market in that kind of environment? What does that guide you to do differently?

JD Peterson:

Yeah, it’s hard, and I think, you know, if I rewound when I got to Perceptyx, like, it was important for us, and we had to go tell that we are an AI, like, we’re doing AI, right? And we had to put ourselves on the map as an AI-focused company. But now I’m starting to feel like we need to increasingly, you know, pull away from some of that messaging.

Not to say we’re not that or anything, but I think about, you know, the early days of the internet, right? You kind of had to advertise, well, we’re an internet-based or a web-based product, you know, that kind of thing. And I think everybody’s kind of doing that with AI.

But the reality is AI is just kind of the, it’s gonna be embedded in everything. Like, it’s table stakes, and it’s already becoming that. Like, if your software hasn’t had any AI, like, what are you doing? Right? Why aren’t you taking advantage of this technology? So I think the core of it and the answer to the question is getting back to focusing on problems and solutions and what we can do to provide value for our customer.

Sure, we’re gonna do it through the best technology we can find, which happens to be AI, but it’s not AI for AI’s sake, right? And I think it’s moving away from that sort of messaging to just getting back to, we’re gonna solve your problem in an elegant, fast, efficient way. Sure, we happen to do AI for it, but the real message, the real marketing’s around that problem and how we’re gonna solve it, and that value we’re gonna bring.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know what’s interesting is, you know, I really believe that, you know, AI is an advantage in sales and marketing if it’s bringing you closer to your customer. So, like, as an example, it’s just like, I know that one of the hot brands in go-to-market right now is Gong, you know, and it’s just like, there’s plenty of raving fans, and at its, you know, core, it is, hey, how do you put kind of that listening to your customer, you know, to use on steroids?

And certainly I understand the value of, like, hey, if you can analyze trends across all of your customer calls, you know, you can discover insights about your customer, or you can, you know, find out, okay, is your sales team talking to your customers in the right way? But then also, you know, you see things like, you know, automating BDRs and all of just the garbage that ends up in your LinkedIn InMail or your email box.

JD Peterson:

You’ve seen my inbox today, man.

Steve Smith:

Yeah, I don’t think that’s doing anything to bring, you know, you closer to your customers. If anything, it’s, I think, pushing them farther away. What’s sort of your, like, strongly held beliefs about AI right now in go-to-market? What do you feel is, you know, something that can bring you closer to your customer, and what do you think is something that you’re seeing not done well right now in go-to-market?

JD Peterson:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll jump to the last part first, of the not done well. Look, I think there’s actually a lot of value and potential value in using things like AI BDR tools and things like that, but I think too many people get lazy around this and sort of give up control. Okay, it’s good enough.

I’ve seen a couple messages it generated. It’s good enough. Go blast it to a million people, right? And I think there’s too much of that losing control, too much, like, letting the human out of the loop, and putting too much trust in these solutions where something like the message you’re sending people is just so critical to your brand and all of your future success that, like, I think you have to keep a close eye on it.

But that’s not to say that tool couldn’t still be really helpful and valuable to help you do things at a scale that’s a little bit bigger, to help you personalize things in a way that would take humans a lot of time, energy. And if you’re able to accomplish some of those things and do it well, then that frees up time to go be strategic or to go, you know, if you can.

I think another great use case, and you hit on this, is, like, if I can free up my people from having to do research and analysis, if I can, you know, research and understand all call transcripts, for example, that are happening with our, you know, salespeople and our prospects and things like that, and I can diagnose that well, I can now, instead of me having to go do all that research and grind through all the information and find the insights, if I can get that delivered, now I can focus on making it better, right?

I can go spend more time with those customers and prospects ’cause I’m not spending all day, you know, sifting through Salesforce data and Tableau reports or whatever, right? Like, I can go actually spend time with the customers, you know, in a bigger way. So I think that it can, you know, free up valuable work, you know, if you leverage in the right way.

But going back to, I think you gotta keep the human in the loop when it comes to things that are critical to your brand and your message. And I see way too many people giving up control of that. And we see it, you and I, we see it in our inbox every day, right? Nonstop. Yeah, I think that’s a big important thing.

But man, look, I’ve been blown away with some of the tools, some of the capabilities of AI that my team has leveraged over the past year. Some of the things we’re doing, we referenced earlier, PYX Labs, our new kind of research labs that’s doing benchmarks and some various projects.

We spun up the website for that in a time that could not have been possible two years ago, right? From conceptual idea to having a full production website the way we wanted with everything there, the process and time that took, mind-blowing compared to what it was just a couple years ago.

So.

Steve Smith:

Absolutely. Well, JD, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time, for sharing a little bit about what you’re working on and sharing your insights in market. And let’s do this again sometime.

JD Peterson:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation. Love what you guys do. So, any way I can help support, fantastic. And yeah, looking forward to the next one.

Steve Smith:

A model that sounds confident can still miss the story.

Large language models are good at summarizing large volumes of employee feedback. On their own, they don't have an organization's history or the context behind a comment. Employees reference things that never show up in the text. A model can read the words and still miss what they point to.

That's a real risk in HR. These recommendations land on real people. A confident answer built on missing context can push a leader toward a fast, wrong decision.

Survey fatigue follows the same logic. When people give feedback and nothing happens, they stop wanting to give it. Listening without action teaches people to stop talking. AI can help a company respond faster. With no one checking its work, it can also help a company ignore its people more efficiently.

The same goes for AI outreach in sales and marketing. Hand a tool your message and walk away, and you end up adding to the garbage in everyone's inbox.

Keep a human in the loop wherever the output reaches a person. For now, judgment is the part of the job that can't be handed off.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Work Tech Weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And I'll see you next time.