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It’s one of the biggest questions leaders are facing in the age of AI: How do you incentivize workers to actually use the tech that might replace them? One London-based company thinks it has the answer, and is offering employees an “AI salary bump” on top of their annual raise.
Starting in April, managers at marketing automation platform Omnisend will award standout AI users with a 2% to 4% raise, said Bernard Meyer, Omnisend’s head of AI operations. The company has budgeted for all of their 250 employees to receive the salary increase at some point—though not everyone will get it in April, he said.
In order to get the raise, employees will be evaluated on three criteria: AI-generated time and cost savings; a tangible, outcome-based impact their AI workflow gave the company; and widespread adoption of the AI workflow they developed. Whether an employee has succeeded in these areas—and, therefore, earns the raise—is up to their manager, Meyer said.
“Before, [the focus of employees using AI] was for individual productivity and now, the focus is on impact,” Meyer says. “People are really just hustling.”
He says he doesn’t expect more than 60% of Omnisend’s workers to receive the raise this go-around, but adds that employees will be re-evaluated on a quarterly basis. One of the best parts about this program, he says, is that it will give Omnisend benchmarks of AI proficiency to measure new hires against. New hires should be able to demonstrate an AI usage similar to or higher than existing employees who received the salary bump.
How is Meyer quantifying the expected ROI of this new program? He says he doesn’t have a great answer right now. But he points to recent Omnisend AI successes as things he’d like to see more of: For example, Omnisend’s sales team has a goal of following up on leads sent their way within 24 hours. Before using AI, the team’s success rate was at 20%, but now, the number is closer to 100%, he says.
One thing he is sure on: This salary bump approach is more solid than vaguely measuring how AI impacts worker productivity.
“I think that people feel so overwhelmed by all of the AI that’s happening,” Meyer says. “We also have generally vague directions from leadership in different companies saying that you should use AI to be more productive, but no one knows what it means in actuality…The salary bump gives people that extra bit of motivation.”
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