Our mobiles are already listening in on us to help service providers understand our deepest desires. Our writing is corrected and augmented automatically and now even our stories are being written for us by AI. We’re interacting daily with various virtual agents by voice and chat. All of this is possible with natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
As we’re transitioning to the 5th industrial revolution (5IR) with machine learning and AI already incorporated into several organizational processes, questions concerning human factors have re-emerged. What kinds of combinations can humans and technologies create? How can technology be used to enhance human capabilities instead of replacing them? How to design ethical AI solutions respecting human privacy and autonomy? The European Union has characterized the 5IR as follows: “It places the wellbeing of the worker at the centre of the production process and uses new technologies to provide prosperity beyond jobs and growth while respecting the production limits of the planet.”
We need to find new ways in which technology can sustainably augment and contribute to humanity. Could AI and natural language technologies, for instance, help us better understand people’s behaviors in organizations and extend human performance by reinforcing psychological safety, wellbeing, and healthy collaboration?
To shed light into the topic, we had a chat with Dr. Shuhua Liu, Adalyon’s Chief Scientific Officer and Founding Partner. She leads the design and development of our novel methodology for next generation behaviour analytics. Shuhua has an extensive international research background with deep knowledge in intelligent systems, management support systems and AI/NLP applications in particular.
Where did it all begin?
Shuhua was introduced into the field of NLP many years ago, at the completion of her doctoral thesis, driven by a vision and ambition to write strategic foresight stories through automated text summarisation. It was a dream back then but has become a reality today. Over the years, she has worked on a variety of AI/NLP applications such as web content and social media analysis for online wellbeing solutions, social intelligence for smart city planning, and early warning models of economic crisis, among others. Shuhua is passionate about making the best use of advanced AI/NLP technologies to benefit our work life, daily life and our society.
Developing Adalyon’s pioneering solution – Ayda – we’ve had the opportunity to apply amazingly powerful transformer models together with other AI and analytics tools, to extract behavioural insights from online team communications, and to help enriching our understanding of group dynamics, especially in virtual and hybrid teams. Together with learning and dialogue mechanisms, our solution will make it easier to constantly nurture psychological safety and performance potential at workplace, to empower people, teams and leaders
What are NLP & Language technologies?
Natural Language Processing (NLP), with its roots dated back in the 1950s, is a fascinating field with long history. It has gathered many bright minds to work on the grand goal for computers to process, analyse, translate, understand, and generate natural language text. Language technology broadly refers to the collection of NLP techniques and tools, but also related to speech technologies such as speech recognition and speech understanding.
Language and text plays such a fundamental role in our life and society, in learning, cognition, history and culture. Natural language is the most complex and nuanced mode of communication for humans. Being able to replicate or even surpass human language capabilities would represent a major milestone in the development of AI. NLP is regarded by many experts as the crown jewel of artificial intelligence. NLP, together with human-machine dialogue, computer vision, machine learning and pattern recognition, as well as knowledge reasoning, form the corner stones of Artificial Intelligence.
In the last decade we have witnessed exponential development and advancement of AI/NLP technologies. Natural language technologies such as information retrieval, information extraction, machine translation, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, text summarisation and text generation can be found in a wide range of applications. The recent arrival of ChatGPT from OpenAI marks a new milestone for AI/NLP technologies and remarkable progress of the field. To cite Prof. Chris Potts from Stanford, we are living in “a golden age for natural language understanding (and AI), may be also a disconcerting age, a weird age, but certainly a time of a lot of innovation and a lot of change”.
What are the possible applications of AI/NLP for people analytics?
AI/NLP technologies have also found applications in people analytics and HR tech. Workforce analytics helps organizations to make sense of data related to employees, such as performance metrics, turnover rates, and demographics. Predictive analytics tries to predict which employees are most likely to leave the company based on factors such as job satisfaction and career growth opportunities. NLP technology is used to analyze employee feedback, survey responses and other text-based data sources. However people analytics solutions have traditionally been designed to serve the needs of executives and the HR function instead of the organization as a whole – teams, team leads and team members. Many conventional workforce monitoring and people analytics solutions run the high risk of intruding into privacy and ethics at work, especially as the regulation progresses with the 5IR and the EU AI Act.
Adalyon aspires to help teams and leaders gain awareness to their own work and behavioural dynamics for safeguarding the psychosocial wellbeing of every team member. To us, the individual employees, leaders and teams as primary users of our solution are of the highest priority. Privacy and autonomy is at the core of our modern privacy architecture and privacy-by-design.
With their intelligence capabilities growing rapidly, AI/NLP technologies will bring great opportunities and enable a new generation of applications based on behavioural analytics, organisational dynamics and behavioural learning. However, there will be new requirements as to how these solutions should be designed in terms of their primary purpose, privacy approach and accessibility.
Ayda – a pioneering solution creating socially sustainable work culture
Ayda is a pioneering next generation solution created by Adalyon for building organizational high performance through psyhological safety. It’s not a tool for traditional employee monitoring or KPI evaluation, but a solution designed for everyone in the organization to help improve their digital leadership and collaboration skills and contribute to psychological safety in everyday work.
Ayda applies advanced AI and NLP technologies by combining the use of transformer models with knowledge based methods in behavioural analysis. We’re analyzing behavioral markers from online collaboration data in environments such as Slack, Google Workspace and Teams, to understand behaviors that exhibit different levels of psychological safety and help to shape it.
Our results have shown stable and consistent performance, both English and multilingual models. In the future, Ayda will support collaboration in different modalities including real world meetings. We will also develop components for learning and guidance to help individuals and teams acquire the knowledge and skills for fostering social wellbeing and performance at work.
Cultural calibration and continuous development
Our current application of transformer models has already produced promising results in automated extraction of behavioural data and analysis of team dynamics. We are continuously developing, validating and updating our methodology and technology stack to incorporate relevant technologies into our solution, to serve different cultural regions and markets. The remarkable advancement in language technology and AI over the last few years brings us an amazing array of technologies that will greatly benefit the development of Ayda. As Reid Hoffman pointed out, “the mainstream adoption of AI is happening now” – the timing is perfect but we need to make sure the technology is applied in the right ways.
We can expect that our efforts will make significant contribution to AI adoption in the management field, and more importantly to transform the power of technology for great social benefit. Are you as excited as us about using advanced AI technology to enable better understanding of team dynamics and enhance psychological safety? Stay tuned!
