Staffbase this week announced a move to transform the employee communications platform into one that leverages agentic AI to build on the concept of engagement to upend the employee experience, allowing employees and employers to communicate in new and more accessible ways.
David Maffei, SVP and GM at Staffbase, told HR Brew that the company’s new Employee AI foundation will help customers on the platform facilitate an enhanced way to deliver content with which employees can interact. How does a personalized weekly podcast sound?
“Communications, as a staple or a backbone, has been what Staffbase for 10 years has been built on, but just like everything else, there’s this evolution upon us in this business,” Maffei said. “There’s an evolution upon what’s happening in technology and what employees expect from communications.”
The company intranet, Maffei contends, is set to radically change its value to employees and businesses with faster resolutions for critical employment- and company-related questions and AI-powered tools that interact with the organization quickly through a single interface.
The company unveiled Employee AI, a new foundation designed to integrate agentic AI into workflows and transform how companies engage, communicate with, and support their workforces.
The shift in thinking represents a change in what Staffbase looks to offer customers. It’s no longer just about broadcasting communication, but rather creating content that enables employees to be more productive and engaged.
Maffei expects the platform to deliver a better employee experience.
“It’s not just to support communicators to make more content or make it faster. It’s to actually create knowledge and information that doesn’t even need to touch a human hand, but will have a material impact on the way that your workforce gets their job done,” he said.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
With new AI tools set for wide release later this year, Staffbase customers can deploy a more relevant and personalized interface to employee communications, “one single pane of glass experience” employees can “literally just talk to” via its AI assistant.
“I can have the interactions that ChatGPT brought to my personal life at work in a way that isn’t the business pushing information down, but rather the business using technology to better connect me to the work I need to do to make a difference for my career and for the enterprise that I’m working for,” he said.
And the new technology is allowing the comms platform to evolve how employees consume company content. Staffbase’s AI-powered personalized employee podcasts feature is set for release later this year. The tool will allow the creation at scale of personalized podcasts for each individual employee that can deliver tailored weekly updates about information relevant to and informed by employees’ overall interaction with the Staffbase platform.
Worried about AI’s end product? Makes sense. Maffei told HR Brew that part of this new foundation includes a governance layer, to ensure that the content is up to date and context relevant for employees.
“This content governance capability, the ability to go in and really make the content relevant and ensure that it’s contextually appropriate, is critical,” he said. “And the fact that you don’t need an army of people that are focused on doing this is going to put you in a situation where the way that this content now flows into an organization’s information architecture will fundamentally change the way information is found.”