How AI Is Changing Communication at Work with David Maffei

Yeah, uh, it, it's, um, it's an evolving topic, as I'm sure you can imagine, and the sorta advent of, uh, everyone using artificial intelligence makes this even more complicated, um, because, uh, I think if you connect the idea of authenticity and artificial intelligence, you actually create more of a gap in intelligence and authentic communication, um, i- instead of sort of shrinking that gap.

But I think, you know, for years, uh, management and leadership inside of organizations around the world were viewed as a source of truth, um, and a place where, um, employees, teammates, workers, associates could trust and feel, um, that the information that they were getting was real and was appropriate, and it was targeted to them in a way that would allow them to do their jobs better, um, and interact across the community.

A lot of that trust over the years has degraded, um, and I think that there's a lot of organizations right now that are working, working very, very hard to try and rebuild that trust through authentic communication, being more transparent, being more open.

Um, and then the artificial intelligence element of this sort of sits on the top and actually makes that a little bit harder because now you have workers, um, and associates and teammates that are wondering, "Is this even a real post? Is this even a real comment? Is this even something that the CEO actually thinks and said, or is this something that someone in internal comms used Claude to create?" So am I even, am I even realizing what authenticity means these days?

Yeah, I think, a- and that's actually, there's, I mean, there's so many layers of, of conversations we could take this.

So first of all, I mean, I do remember when we, we were shifting.

We were trying to shift from the scripted, you know, CEO looking at the camera with a teleprompter or very, you know, crafted email to more authen- what we called authentic clips or, you know, videos or, you know, real-life, um, kind of conversations.

Um, today you're looking at those, and you don't even know if they're real anymore, right?

[laughs]

So maybe we should step back here for a second and, and ask what is com- communication now?

Yeah, it, it, it's funny.

Um, i- if you think back, and I've talked about this quite a bit, um, when, when March of 2020 hit and, and COVID essentially shut down the world, um, every single enterprise in the world was met with sort of an immediate problem they needed to solve, and the immediate problem they needed to solve was to immediately deploy Zoom or Teams or whatever tool they needed to in order to be able to connect their people together, right? For some organizations, a very small percentage, organizations were already, uh, sort of remote working.

But the vast majority of organizations, especially those with frontline workers, um, weren't at all and had no plans and concepts to be prepared to be able to do that.

Um, when you saw, I, I think there was a stat where on March 12th, 2020, there were 12 million daily active users on Microsoft Teams, and by September 1st, it was, like, 100 million.

And so when you think about that, right, every one of these enterprises, and all of us in our world at Staffbase, immediately ran to deploy these tools to be able to better connect the employees.

Right.

What was missed in-

And, and that's, that's, um, that's the te- the technical aspect of it, that we, more people learned to communicate without physically being in the same space, right? Um-

Sure

...

I think the other aspects, though, was we also learned, and you talked about trust, right? Um, because if you remember back to March 2020, right, we didn't know it was happening.

We, we had no plan.

We didn't know how long this was gonna take.

We also learned communication was the quick and dirty five minutes of, "Here's what I know.

We'll talk again tomorrow," versus the nicely crafted presentation Rev 2005 that, you know, you send after 15 reviews.