Will Artificial Compassion take care of our Mental Health?

Introduction

Being a chess enthusiast myself, I distinctly remember the moment back in 1997 when the famous Chess Grandmaster Gary Gasparov lost to an IBM computer called ‘Deep Blue’. Deep Blue’s win was seen as symbolically significant, a sign that artificial intelligence was catching up to human intelligence, and could defeat one of humanity’s great intellectual champions.

Championing intellect & intuition

While Deep Blue mainly relied on brute computational force to evaluate millions of positions, one of his successors — Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo — took it a step further and used neural networks and reinforcement learning to secure a win in ‘Go’, a game with far more possible moves than chess, which requires more intuition and is far less susceptible to brute force.

The AlphaGo win dates back to 2016, and as we all know, things are moving quickly. A recent study by Oracle showed that in addition to intellectual and intuitive ‘wisdom’, people are also beginning to trust AI to reflect on their emotional well-being.

Employees believe companies should do more

Oracle partnered with research firm Workplace Intelligence to survey more that 12,000 employees, managers, HR leaders and C-level executives across 11 countries. The results were eye-opening: 82% of people believe robots can support their mental health better than humans, and 68% would prefer talking to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety at work. What’s more, 75% of employees believe their company should be doing more to protect the mental health of their workforce.

When we researched the well-being space ourselves, in close collaboration with numerous People Leads and C-level executives, we asked the same questions over and over again: what role should organisations play in employee mental health? What types of support are employees asking for? Can technology help meet the mental health challenges organisations are facing, just as it has proven to be a solution for keeping people connected in digital workspaces?

Based on our research, we concluded that organisations do want to do more to protect the mental health of their workforce. The next step in our research was understanding the factors that prevent leadership from taking a more active role in ensuring employee wellbeing. What is holding them back from cracking down on the problems of burnouts, absenteeism, and high employee turnover rates? We posed questions, ideated, brainstormed, phrased, sketched, reflected, rephrased, re-sketched, all in collaboration with People leaders and C-level executives.

What Noon is about

This is where we stand today: we crafted an evidence-based model which allows leaders to spot work-related causes of stress and make changes driven by data to see immediate well-being improvements within their workspace. We then encapsulated our model into an elegant tool that integrates into a company’s existing workflow without disruptions. We call it Noon: a tool for data driven well-being insights, which provides companies with actionable data on well-being, and enables teams to increase energy levels and build resilience.

Interested to learn more about how Noon seamlessly integrates with your organisational tech stack to infuse wellbeing right within the core of your workplace? Noon delivers a wellbeing strategy, execution plan and collaboration tool at the same time. Reach out to me if you want to learn more!

Resources to do some digging yourself:
AI@Work Study 2020: by Oracle & Workplace Intelligence

The AI Journal: Using AI to support mental wellbeing in the workplace

Empathy at Work: Why psychologists think empathy is a key leadership skill