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PERCEPTIVE EXPERIENCE

Perception

Three Hearts, Nine Brains, and a Head with Eight Arms

Octopuses have blue blood, no bones, three hearts, nine brains, and eight arms joined to the head. Two hearts send blood to the gills, while the third pumps it around the body. A central brain sits in the head, with one at the base of each arm to control movement. The majority of neurons are found in the arms, which can independently touch, taste, and control basic motion without input from the main brain.

As a result, an octopus can “see” photons with its skin and change color without inputs from the eyes or brain. Despite being color-blind via a lack of cones in their eyes, 400 million years of evolution allows octopuses to be nature’s ninjas, to hide from prey via camouflage among the most dynamic in nature. How they process visual information, and then send out the correct commands to their skin, is something we don’t yet understand.

Octopuses also change color to communicate, their skin a visual grammar of its own. They do this with the aid of specialized cells called chromatophores containing color-producing pigment, and light reflectors called iridophores and leucophores. Combined, these produce the uncanny changes in skin color and texture that reflect evolutionary design thinking at its finest.

In effect, the octopus’ perception is an external, mostly accurate version of reality. They draw the map and merge it with the landscape.

Innovation, Creativity, Emotional Intelligence

Compared to just a decade ago, today’s corporate experience landscape is radically different, with COVID-19 pressing the button on even faster, more fundamental changes. The field of experience design has been reshaped by the tremendous success of design thinking, enabling the creation of products and services that better serve both customer expectations and employee needs. However, to continue to meet these rising requirements, a new approach is needed.

In the Live Enterprise model, perceptive experiences are delivered by blending the capabilities of heart, brain, and machine together in an integrated way. Every user is a unique cosmos, with its emotion, ambitions, and potential. At the core, there is an inherent human nature, surrounded by the wider environment and the context in which they operate. To significantly enhance user experience, we need to understand their emotional state and contextualize the experience to make it personalized and useful for their needs. The enterprise digital brain constantly senses the signals emitted by users as part of their experiential actions and events to anticipate their needs and recommend actions that optimize their productivity.

The computational power of technology and telemetry is used continuously to understand experience design effectiveness and user challenges. The telemetry learns from user actions, understands relevance of the predictive suggestions or recommendations, and identifies points of friction in the user journey. Combining these aspects through computational design allows designers to focus on what they do best—innovation, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence.

It’s a long and winding road, and we’re still playing catch-up. Then again, when it comes to experience, nature did have a 3.8-billion-year head start.

A New Model of Experience

The success of design thinking has coincided with significant change to the operational landscape marked by an unprecedented change of pace, evolving consumers and employees, plus a growing appetite for evidence. Design thinking enabled profound and transformational change for business by reframing problems to focus on users and their needs. It emphasizes problem finding before problem solving, what should be done before diving into how to do it. The problem space is explored to go beyond requirements definition (what a user needs) to uncover motivations (why they want it) and understand what is really going on. This establishes a problem worth solving, and then traditional brainstorming can open up the solution space, identify ideas, and rapidly experiment with prototypes and quick feedback through iterations to converge on solutions that are personally desirable, technically feasible, and economically viable. We call this flare–focus, flare–focus: broaden the problem space, then identify a specific problem, then explore multiple possibilities, and finally converge on a solution.

A beneficial by-product is getting to the tangible more quickly, like a prototype or user journey. Design thinking demands evidence. The past decade has witnessed the transformative power of design thinking, as design-led organizations outperformed their peers. Apple, Microsoft, and Nike are well-known examples of firms that have used design thinking effectively to drive bottom-up innovation, and we have used it extensively at Infosys as well. This success has driven a profound change in the operational landscape—widespread acceptance that design excellence matters, to customers, employees, and even shareholders. At the same time, design thinking has shown limits to move from single initiatives to enterprise effectiveness. It is reaching the point of parity as more companies adopt it and new challenges emerge. Design thinking needs to be complemented by a new model to maintain current momentum, and to meet growing stakeholder expectations and company responsibilities. The required changes can be understood in terms of three macro-level challenges, each of which will affect all organizations in the decade ahead: change is the only constant, evolving expectations and a growing appetite for evidence. (See Figure 3.1.)

Change Is the Only Constant

The accelerating pace of innovation is disrupting established business models. Technology already changes faster than humans or organizations can process, and yet the pace of change is only getting faster. In an environment where change is the only constant, organizations require an unprecedented level of business agility to operate successfully. Our own experience, as well as working with the world’s largest companies, has shown that the traditional linear approach to developing products and services is no longer fit for purpose. Even with agile delivery methods, projects take too long to progress between iterations and cannot keep pace with changing requirements. A new approach is required—one that embraces the new reality and shapes experiences that, like evolution itself, continuously adapt to change.

Evolving Expectations

The relentless uptick in customer and employee expectations from digital services challenges organizations to deliver increasingly better experiences. A person has fluid expectations for customer experience because any one experience they have permeates every other experience they will have in the future, regardless of industry or context. No longer is your customer or employee experience (EX) measured exclusively against your industry competitors, but also against technology pioneers like Apple, Airbnb, Uber, and so on.

This challenge transcends the traditional barrier between the consumer and enterprise markets. We no longer accept experiences in our working lives that are significantly worse than the experiences we receive as consumers. To add complexity, as our society undergoes a cultural drive toward an individualism that celebrates diversity, traditional methodologies that assign people to broad demographic groupings don’t provide the level of detail needed to address this adequately.

While organizations that sell to consumers attempt to address this diversity by targeting ever-more specific customer segments, companies in the enterprise market cannot. New methods are needed that allow organizations to understand a more diverse range of distinct user needs with the same depth of understanding.

Growing Appetite for Evidence

As experience becomes the differentiating factor for service-oriented organizations, it has also become a driving force for value creation. Our experience working with the Infosys executive team and many large client organizations has shown that they are no longer willing to make decisions based on consultant opinions or industry best practices. Instead, leaders demand hard evidence of the value that a given design decision delivers against their business objectives.

The user research methodologies that served us well until now need to be supercharged to respond to the increased demands placed on them. At the same time, we must ensure that this desire for evidence does not impede creative thinking and innovation. Designing effective products and services in this context is a challenge that is complex and multidimensional, and demands bold, innovative answers that often break new ground.

The New Paradigm

Current methods to design digital experiences rely primarily on the creative and analytical abilities of designers and are limited in their ability to solve design challenges to their full potential. The computational power of technology augments and amplifies designer problem-solving abilities, overcoming these limitations. Computational design addresses the macro-level design challenges of change as the only constant, evolving expectations and the growing appetite for evidence. This represents a pivotal change in the way products and services are designed, and the approach is based on three principles: design adaptable, design inclusive, and design measurable. When adopted together, these principles provide designers and businesses an approach to address the challenges. (See Figure 3.2.)

Design Adaptable

To address the challenge of a changing landscape, common perspectives toward change must also evolve. The current view that change is a risk to be mitigated gives way to a new paradigm that sees change as an opportunity to embrace. Design solutions need to be adaptable so organizations react to change in a fast, frictionless, and cost-effective way.

Design Inclusive

To address the complexities of evolving customer and EX, businesses must evolve the way they understand, segment, and target users. The current belief that sees a single-best design solution yields to a new paradigm that sees design manifest itself in a thousand variants, customized to the user on the basis of a deep understanding of who they are. Computational design serves each user with a tailored experience that matches their needs and expectations.

Design Measurable

To address the growing importance of evidence-based decision making, approaches to measurement must also evolve. The current view that sees measurement as an activity undertaken after release gives way to a new approach that sees measurement as core to design, built into its DNA from inception. Define what success looks like through unambiguous KPIs, as one of the first activities designers undertake. These KPIs enable continuous measurement of design effectiveness, leading to a shift in decision making from opinion to tangible, objective evidence.

Experience is the new frontier of value creation, a frontier that continually expands. In this landscape, organizations create value by adopting principles of computational design—adaptive, inclusive, measurable—and deliver experiences that meet growing customer and employee expectations and lead to better business outcomes.

Organizations that embrace this new reality will receive an abundance of valuable data points for customers, employees, and users overall. To ignore this quantitative approach will trap companies into projects that may be anecdotally accurate pilots, but fail to deliver value when fully deployed.

Computational design has applicability in wider areas like architecture as well; however, here we are referring to computational design in the context of experience design.

Computational Design

Transcending Design Limits in Form and Function

Designing successful digital experiences requires understanding people using qualitative and quantitative methods, using insights developed from the data to create a number of different creative approaches, and assessing the success of these approaches. These activities are currently limited by designer capacity for computation, but technology can overcome these limits.

Take modern architecture, for example, where computational and generative design technologies model and shape some of the world’s most impressive buildings—masterpieces of form and function impossible to conceive and build before these capabilities were developed. Computational capabilities have dramatically disrupted the architectural market, changing not only the final, designed product but also the ways of working to achieve it. The result has not been a replacement of the human component but rather an augmentation, helping architects and engineers reach new levels of creativity and delivery.

Computational design has only begun to realize its potential in the field of experience design. Introducing a computational dimension in the design process will catalyze a new generation of experiences—computational experiences—and a new approach to solve business problems. This new design model is driven by four principles—sentience indicators, codified design language, continuous measurement, and an integration-first approach.

Understanding Through Sentience Indicators

In traditional design methodologies, experience designers use personas to understand users. This technique creates an imaginary avatar as a surrogate for humans, to assess the effectiveness of design ideas. Despite designer best efforts to base personas on reality, the technique is deeply flawed. Personas encourage designers to see users as a homogenous cohort, rather than a diverse population of individuals—and anyone who doesn’t fit the cohort is ignored. The best design processes incorporate actual people into the process to correct for the limitations of personas or user journeys that may miss the way real people actually interact with the experience.

Computational design keeps the focus on humans rather than personas by interpreting, codifying, and measuring the behavior of a diverse group of real users in real time at a detailed level. It eliminates the need to rely on personas as a proxy for users. Instead, products can be designed using data from real users, opening the path to individual needs, motivations, aspirations, and concerns. This process is continuous and fully automated. It computes, analyzes, and unlocks correlations between psychometric data and telemetry data, plus defines behavioral indicators of user characteristics. Because the process moves designers closer to true awareness, these metrics are called key sentience indicators (KSIs). (See Figure 3.3.)

Codified Design Language over Aesthetics

To apply the power of computation to the design of products and services, designers define experiences in a way that computers understand—codified as information, rather than aesthetics. The computational design schema is a structured model of information that defines the structure, style, and content of the interface with KSIs. Experiences defined in this way can be manipulated by algorithms that generate multiple variants in response to data inputs.

Many subtly different variants are generated without the need to produce endless design visuals. This automatic generation marks a shift from the creation of a single monolithic experience dictated entirely by a designer, to a continuously evolving, live experience directed by a designer and amplified through technology.

Measurability Coded into DNA

To meet the demand for evidence-based design, solutions must have a codified measurability element embedded into their DNA from the beginning. This measurability assesses design efficacy in a tangible, live context. Analysis and testing become part of the design process itself, with designers enhancing their assessment of design ideas with data and relying less on intuition, or on imperfect prototypes tested in artificial situations. Computational design shifts to data-driven decision making, where solutions are objectively assessed and unconscious bias minimized.

An Integration-First Approach

Computational design turns traditional workflow on its head. Instead of integrating design solutions into technical architecture after all design decisions have been made and an experience created, the solution is integrated at the start. Developers work out how a product interacts with supporting systems before the experience has been designed. This upfront integration step renders design ideas directly into the product, with connections to back-end systems already established.

This shift from a linear, sequential development process to a continuous deployment capability means there is almost no latency to propose a design idea and assess its success. Designers no longer manually and loosely estimate costs and benefits to implement design ideas, given their new freedom to propose any number of design ideas and test them directly in the product.

The Case for Adoption

Computational design delivers a tailored experience to every user, so products and services better meet evolving end user expectations. In addition, computational design capabilities increase efficiency by optimizing operational processes. In a transactional journey, this efficiency includes effort reduction, self-serve adoption, and drop-off reduction. As a revenue driver, computational design drives engagement and conversions. Transactional journey metrics include conversion ratio and increased engagement.

Figure 3.4 (see next page) represents how the experience is configured and tailored to each user based on their personality and behavioral traits.

The value of computational design is unlocked progressively, on a compounding basis, as it is deployed in a growing number of scenarios and capabilities within the adopting organization’s landscape. Although individual gains might be relative and tactical in isolation, the aggregated gains become a strategically important matter and influence decision making.

We recommend applying computational design to experiences involving the following criteria:

   Decisions. Based on role, information preferences, mandate, previous decision-making patterns, or need for cognition.

   Navigation. How people navigate through an application, similar to Netflix (search, browse by genre, browse by actor, trending [adding peer pressure]). This affects the amount of content choices presented initially and recommendation intensity.

   Support required. Dynamically increase level of support to complete a transaction. Examples include login, shopping cart checkout, or mortgage application.

   Transactional opportunity. Dynamically display upsell/cross-sell opportunity in the form of content or service premium, depending on purchaser type. Applies to any transactional site.

   Information and insight. Applies to dashboards, landing pages, and product listing pages. Based on information preferences, role, decision-making style, and need for cognition.

A Cultural Catalyst for Change

As experience continues to differentiate, design will continue its rise in organizational importance. Gone are the days where a design department engaged mostly in the production of internal marketing material. Design professionals moved up the value chain from visual communications to become designers of the business. As organizations embed design into enterprise architecture and culture, their designers need a diverse set of skills, experiences, and perspectives. Computational design requires a cultural transition within the design function itself, bringing together the worlds of design, technology, and business.

As computational design demonstrates the value of design through a KPI lens, it minimizes one of the primary causes of friction in traditional design—lack of a quantified business case. The appetite and openness to undertake innovation will grow, as computational design continues to deliver compounding value.

Reimagine Employee Experience

EX as Priority

While there are plenty of definitions for employee experience (EX), the key concept is employees at the center, aligned with enterprise. We define EX as organizations and their employees collaborating to create personalized, motivating experiences across work, workforce, and workplace to improve performance and alignment to purpose. Employee experience traditionally played second fiddle to customer experience, but no longer, as organizations understand EX drives business success.

Gallup demonstrates through their research surveys that employee engagement and satisfaction have a direct impact on company performance. Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by over 100 percent in earnings per share.¹ Happy employees are more productive at work and more likely to recommend the organization to others when they leave. According to Gallup, highly engaged business units reflect lower absences and employee turnover, higher productivity, and even increased sales and profitability. Our own experience bears this out as well. As Live Enterprise principles were adopted across Infosys, employee turnover declined and sales increased.

While savvy companies have always valued employees, three trends elevated the prioritization of employee experience for other firms. First, the talent shortage demonstrated the stakes involved, to get and keep the talent needed to run the business. Stakeholder capitalism highlighted the need to see beyond profitability as corporate goals, and employees took note of their employer’s stance on environmental and social issues. Of course, the pandemic also drove home the point that EX includes well-being as well as sentiment and productivity. Tying this all together is trust, that invisible yet deep-seated feeling that is also influenced by how companies address privacy concerns and personal data. Companies must create compelling experiences that win trust so that employees are willing to share that data.

These experiences need to meet employee needs across the life cycle from hire to retire, and reimagined in the context of an anytime, anywhere operating model, where work gets done by employees from anywhere using the connected digital tools provided to them. This is not just about experience, but also requires reimagining existing operational processes, organizational policies, employee engagement, and health and wellness. Increasingly, enterprises need the flexibility to let employees work anytime, anywhere (remotely, at office, at remote site) across a broad spectrum of options: from 100 percent at physical premises to 0 percent at physical premises and all work performed remotely. Reimagining of experiences and processes is done in collaboration to ensure that sentient and computational design elements are weaved in across the entire process.

Go to Win

General Peter Pace (USMC-Ret.), former chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented that to succeed, a leader must deliver across three dimensions: “Give very clear guidance, resource it appropriately and go to win.”² That guidance shapes employee experience, but the more empowered and self-directed teams are, the harder it becomes to do.

Managers are responsible for 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement,³ and it’s no surprise EX and state of mind rank high on the chief human resource officer (CHRO) agenda. In the pandemic’s switch to mass working from home, EX became central to the C-suite agenda too. However, given workforce diversity and variance across industries, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to EX. A good experience for one employee may not be so for another. To deliver on the individual needs of their people, companies must understand expectations, design to deliver that experience, and measure how the solution impacts experience.

Experience-Centric Process Design

Traditionally, process design looked at compliance and efficiency as primary parameters, with experience an afterthought at best. Processes were not designed to deliver a certain experience. That school of thought has now been turned on its head with experience-centric process design. What does that mean to design for EX? Put the employee at the center of the design process, considering their needs and behaviors; consider the functional requirements of the company; consider the culture within which the process exists; then use those inputs to determine the optimal processes and the best digital tools to enable those processes and experiences.

Employee expectations are simple to document, but difficult to make a reality:

   Employees expect the tools to do their job effectively, like data access at the point decisions are made.

   Employees expect to use their preferred channels and devices. This could be access to apps and data on smartphones, or the option to connect with the helpdesk via email, phone, chat, or self-service.

   Employees expect to be empowered to resolve issues quickly. Provide self- service capabilities and minimize the touch points to resolve an issue.

Employee interactions should be fast, accurate, and successful; then deliver them in a manner that exceeds expectations. For example, employees engage with HR frequently on a variety of issues during their tenure at an organization. Their expectation with HR is to receive a one-stop, stress-free experience. HR’s priority is to ensure the resolution is completed and recorded, in compliance with policies and regulations. To deliver this successfully they need to understand and align with the employee’s frame of mind.

Employee interactions are increasingly digital, and technology plays a significant role to determine satisfaction. The company should provide digital systems that are simple for employees to use, base them on processes designed for experience and performance, and strengthen these systems via continuous cycles of user feedback.

Experience Measurement

Only dissatisfied or extremely delighted employees tend to provide feedback on satisfaction surveys, and measuring employee satisfaction can be difficult, with responses from these groups around only 4 to 5 percent of total participants. A better way to measure experience is to distinguish EX from the desired outcome.

EX is not an outcome in itself. However, it can help predict outcomes of interest, such as engagement or satisfaction. For example, the goal may be increased customer engagement, supported by sentiment analysis at the help desk level, by text analysis of tickets raised. These measurements create a broad, encompassing index of employee happiness that can be benchmarked and tracked over time.

A leading Australia-based telecom company (and Infosys client) deployed an employee sentiment analysis and monitoring tool. Conversation between employees and agents was extracted from the ticketing platform, and a text-mining model was developed and applied on each incoming conversation. From this, every conversation was assigned a sentiment score, which identified trigger points that could potentially lead to escalation or employee dissatisfaction. Based on real-time sentiment scores, each query was flagged and color-coded. The outcome? Timely identification of issues and effective query resolution significantly improved employee satisfaction, and poor sentiments were shared with advocates on the HR team for proactive, affirmative steps to address employee happiness.

The Workplace Reimagined

Moments, Memories, and Magic

Rapidly evolving circumstances require that organizations create employee-centered business environments. Although this represents a cultural shift for traditionalists who just got used to the idea of being customer-centric, our Infosys EX and research indicates employee-centricity does more than improve operational metrics. It also builds resilience through longer employee tenure and develops stronger collaboration and reputation networks.

Every employee is on their own journey, one with a series of moments, memories, and magic—to them, as well as the firm. The business world became familiar with the power of moments that matter through the book of similar name by Chip and Dan Heath. The Live Enterprise principle of micro-change management is based on defining small changes based on noteworthy moments, then reinforcing these interactions so they become memories. These memories are certainly employee memories, but they also become memories in the enterprise knowledge graph and input into the digital brain. Then the best of these memories are combined, enhanced, and amplified to become magical—“wow factors,” in the old vernacular.

This concept is loosely aligned to the work of Abraham Maslow, the legendary twentieth-century psychologist, whose 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”⁴ described humans as a perpetually wanting animal and introduced his famous hierarchy of human needs. This is a critical point in 2020, because the pandemic challenged the previously sacrosanct hierarchy of needs and forced us to look at it with fresh eyes. While safety and security were still basic needs, our employees also simultaneously cared about belonging and self-esteem. Some employees even used the pandemic lockdowns as serendipitous opportunities to achieve their full potential, including creative activities—which happens to be the definition of self-actualization. Again, while this reaffirms the needs that Maslow identified, our findings also suggest a transition from a hierarchy to a holistic simultaneous set of needs when people are under stress. This provides information to designers to design experiences that support employees even when working in stressful environments.

Psychology shows that when remembering our experiences, we forget the minute-by-minute and instead focus on certain moments of high intensity or emotion—first day at school, first kiss, birth of a child, or taste of an orange. In the corporate world, leaders are traditionally not equipped to create the flow from moments to memories to magic, because each of these involve distinctly different capabilities of empathy, change management, and sentience. The Live Enterprise model relates each of these experience capabilities in logical progression, aided by flexible architecture and shared digital infrastructure.

Reimagining the Employee Journey

Times have changed, perhaps the understatement of the century. The traditional office workweek has gone, so too the old concept of the “office” itself, as the pace of change has accelerated and people no longer expect to stay 35 years at one company before collecting the gold watch. Consumers switch brands in a heartbeat if their expectations are not met, and employees do too—particularly millennials and generation X. Employees want a career in work environments that share their values and support their journey, a place where they can learn, be challenged, and make a difference in their field or the wider world.

For years, organizations strived to provide good customer experiences, create sensible user journeys, predict customer behavior, and deliver what they want, when and where they want it. Turns out, employees are no different. As Richard Branson said, “Look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.” Yet for years employees received the poorest experience of any company stakeholder: with green screens and slow networks, help(less) desks, and sterile cubicles, employees looked with envy as customer and partners received priority and consideration for experience and funding. Exceptions occurred at high-flying tech firms and some other notable companies, but employees typically did not receive high-quality experience and internal systems even at high-performing firms. As the talent war broke out and the talent famine emerged for desirable jobs, companies began to change their priorities, and the COVID-19 outbreak accelerated the shift to valuing employees and their experience.

This is reinforced by Skyler Mattson, president of WONGDOODY, Infosys’s global design and experience studio: “The future of work cannot just be the CHRO’s job, it must be on the rest of the C-Suite agenda. What we did for consumer experience has to happen for employees—not just a cost-saving exercise, but also a revenue and margin generation opportunity.”

To give employees the best experience, the first step is to listen to what they need to determine what they value, no matter how or where they’re working—in the office, at home, on the road, or on Teams or Zoom. A useful approach is to apply customer experience principles to employee experience. (See Figure 3.5.)

Source: Infosys, “The Changing Workplace: Changing Tactics to Craft a Best in Class Employee Experience.”

Mapping the Journey

When they join a company, every employee embarks on a unique journey with many average days but also significant moments, memories, and magic, which are personal to them. These include moving to another role or location, being promoted, or surviving redundancy.

While traditionally the EX covers every employee interaction, special attention should be given to the most significant ones and leaving nothing to chance:

   Transitions, like first day on a job, promotion, or leaving the organization.

   Milestones, such as one-year employment anniversary or achieving a significant sales target.

   Pits, such as a critical tool or process not working properly, personal tough times, or even lockdown at home for health reasons.

   System interactions on the tools we use to do our basic job function (employee personal productivity app, learning app, onboarding app). While transactions are not memorable individually, over time they inform employee opinion on whether the company values their experience.

To map EX, identify these moments in your organization by talking to employees, and interview a representative sample to discover strengths and pain points in the employee community. (See Figure 3.6.)

Source: Infosys, “The Changing Workplace: Changing Tactics to Craft a Best in Class Employee Experience.”

Contactless Contact (Center)

The customer service function is undergoing transformation. This manifests as traditional contact centers operating as remote ready centers, traditional voice interactions moving to contactless self-service channels, siloed channels merging to provide an omnichannel experience, and high-touch experiences becoming self-service driven. After the COVID-19 outbreak, these existing trends accelerated, with all companies moving toward the anytime, anywhere model.

At Infosys, a lot of operations that were traditionally done through the contact center have now been made available through our InfyMe personal productivity app, and it has reduced the volume of calls and made it easier for our employees to access these services anytime, anywhere.

Beyond convenience, the experience is also becoming sentient with AI services used to perform deep analytics and deliver real-time guidance to agents so that they are better prepared to handle customer interactions. This improves both customer satisfaction and agent performance. AI predictions, learning, and next best actions empower both new and experienced agents. These capabilities help reimagine entire customer care operations by providing intelligence to aid better communication, smarter and faster decision making, and delivering value at scale.

Carbon + Silicon: The Human-AI Dynamic

As consumers, AI is an increasingly common component of our digital journeys, guiding us with recommendation engines and chatbots that are available 24/7 to answer questions and provide support. AI tools are designed to make things simpler and more efficient, and in a world of information and system overload, they also support and improve the EX.

Too often, when employees think of internal systems, they think of complex web portals and navigation paths. At Infosys, employee applications were a long list of individually functional, but collectively confusing applications. Our internal information systems team converted dozens of separate applications into three employee mobile apps: InfyMe for internal processes, Lex for learning, and LaunchPad for new hire onboarding. The app simplification significantly improved the EX by integrating mobile, chatbot, voice, widgets, and messenger functionality. These stories and their benefits are true across the employee life cycle, but AI assistants are especially helpful in the areas of professional and personal development. Assistants improve professional development by learning about the employee’s preferences and interests, and making personalized recommendations that align employee and organization goals. Personal development is aided through analysis of all available employee data and interactions to improve their soft skills and develop their own self-coaching approach.

For human resource leaders, EX unlocks new opportunities to engage employees, in addition to enabling operational efficiency. By bringing all of a team’s calendars and relationships together, intelligent applications can suggest time slots when managers should check in with each team member and gently reinforce policy, helping keep companies on the right side of employment law and what’s right for their people. Also, employee engagement is dynamic and can now be monitored in real time, on an ongoing basis, with feedback and recommended intervention as relevant.