How AT&T’s HR team steers 80,000 workers in using its internal generative AI tool
With questions around whether AI is actually making workers more productive, companies are doubling down efforts to offer their own generative AI tools.
This way, employees have a built-in, seamless option that can help companies better understand how the tool is actually being used. Last week, we reported on Nestlé’s NesGPT. The consumer goods company is one of many companies to have built their own tool – as is AT&T’s Ask AT&T.
The telecommunications company has been heavily invested in AI for decades, even being in the room when the term artificial intelligence was coined back in 1955. Fast forward to today, Ask AT&T is the company’s solution for making GenAI secure, reliable, and helpful for its employees.
“GenAI represents a huge leap in making artificial intelligence accessible to everyone, and we think it has great potential to completely transform how businesses operate,” said Andy Markus, chief data officer at AT&T.
The tool launched in June 2023, giving more than 80,000 employees access to help them be more efficient, creative, and productive. Markus says that while AT&T’s initial use case was for software development, employees across the company are using it to analyze and optimize the network, detect fraud, summarize documents, and answer general-purpose questions.
In a lot of ways, it’s helping break down silos across departments. Markus is seeing that himself, particularly in the HR sector.
“HR teams and leaders have a critical role to play in educating employees about GenAI,” said Markus. “Writing code, querying documents such as vendor contracts, and finding insights in massive databases has never been easier.”
For example, AT&T’s HR team was critical in helping write its AI policy and AI guiding principles documents. These documents explain to AT&T employees how to ethically and securely use generative AI. That’s paired with HR teams creating educational videos and other materials to train employees on specific uses for generative AI that are relevant to their jobs.
“There’s still a belief among many people that GenAI is only for technical roles, and that’s just not so,” said Markus. “It’s for everyone.”
While HR gets the opportunity to upskill and learn the best way to leverage HR, they also don’t need to be bombarded with answering questions about benefit details, vacation days, or how to track their hours. Ask AT&T is being trained to have not just general knowledge about the company’s overall policies, but to be able to answer specific, personal queries from each employee about those topics.
The company is evolving its internal GPT by implementing technologies such as retrieval-augmented generation, that make the responses more reliable by requiring Ask AT&T to source its answers from approved documents or sources.
“As GenAI becomes more central to the employee experience, accuracy is crucial,” said Markus.
The team is also developing image recognition tools to add to Ask AT&T, which will allow employees to upload images and ask questions about them. In the future, that might expand to where Ask AT&T can generate new images for use in ads, training materials, company presentations, and more.
“HR will be critical to helping employees be aware of these tools as they come online and how to use them,” said Markus. “HR leaders have a critical role to play in setting the example for their teams that GenAI is a great tool that can assist all employees and make them more productive.”