The AI experience is already happening. Who is designing it?
We’re all running at AI adoption, but it’s being led by the tech.
The AI experience is already happening. Who’s designing it?
Fauna fundamentals
There’s something really fascinating going on right now, we’re all running at AI adoption but it’s being led by the tech. We seem to have forgotten the change impact and experience of this monumental shift. And let’s be honest, the best AI rollouts won’t be remembered for the tech.
Here’s a scenario that’s playing out in organisations globally…
Someone opens a new AI tool at work. Nobody explained why it’s there or what it means for how they do things. Their manager hasn’t mentioned it. There’s been a company-wide email, maybe, but it didn’t really say enough. So, they click around, feel a bit lost, make their own assumptions about what it all means, and partially take up the software. Probably with some increased anxiety.
Multiply that by every person in your organisation. Compound it with companywide communications that say things like ‘we’re going to lead the AI race in our industry’ without the strategic detail that gives enough clarity. That’s the AI employee experience many people are having right now.
Who’s holding up the human side of this?
We talk a lot about AI as a technology challenge, or a business strategy challenge. What it is, just as much, is an employee experience challenge. One that most employee experience teams have not yet been invited into.
2025 Mercer research suggests only 13% of employees say they have heard from HR about the impact of AI on their role. So if HR isn’t talking about it, and senior leaders aren’t talking about it, and managers don’t have the language to talk about it, people will fill that silence themselves. And the stories they tell themselves are rarely the ones we’d choose.
Your AI employee experience is already happening, whether you’re designing it or not.
We said something like that in an earlier piece about employee experience. It’s just as true here. The AI transition is not a future event your people are waiting for. It’s a present reality they’re navigating, every day, with or without you.
This is our moment
We need to take an AI lens to our experience mapping. It requires an ongoing, iterative, deeply human practice of understanding what your people are experiencing at every stage of this evolution and designing proactively, not reactively, for what comes next.
What this looks like in practice
Approaching the AI transition as an employee experience challenge means doing some things we already know how to do, with a different perspective. Here is what that looks like right now.
Before you communicate anything about AI, you need to know what your people are actually experiencing. Not what leaders assume they are experiencing. What they are genuinely feeling, doing, and making sense of.
Your employee journey already has critical moments. Now each of them has a new dimension.
First hellos
- Onboarding: Is AI literacy part of how you set cultural and behavioural expectations from day one? Or does it get bolted on six months later when someone notices the gap?
- Development and growth: Do career conversations include how skills are evolving, not just where people want to go? People want to know their potential matters. In an AI era, they also need to know what their potential looks like.
- Manager conversations: Are your managers equipped to have honest, informed conversations about how AI is affecting their team’s work?
- Communication and connection: Is your internal communications function actively building understanding of AI changes, at every level, in language that belongs to your organisation? Bring this team into the conversation today.
- Recognition: As roles evolve and new ways of working emerge, are you recognising adaptation itself? The employee who found a smarter way. The team that worked out how to integrate a new tool into their workflow beautifully.
Fond farewells
And you’ll need to do it again, and again. Because this is not a one-time project. AI-driven change is not a moment, it’s a direction. The employee experience of it will look different in six months. The listening has to be ongoing, the design has to be iterative and the communication has to feel live.
Designed with people. Not at them.
People don’t need you to have all the answers. Honestly, the organisations that pretend they do tend to make things worse. What people need is to feel like someone is paying attention to their voice, with a human hand on the experience button.
What we’re building at Fauna
This is new. We’re developing a set of ways to work with organisations who want to be intentional about the employee experience of AI change.
- AI experience listening programmes. Getting under the skin of what your people are actually experiencing right now, where the gaps are, and what your moments of opportunity look like.
- AI experience journey mapping. Looking at your employee journey from first hellos to fond farewells through a new lens and identifying where AI change needs to be consciously designed for.
- Manager readiness. Giving your managers the confidence, the language, and the tools to have real conversations with their teams about how work is evolving.
- Iterative listening design. Building a regular rhythm of insight that tracks how the experience evolves over time, so your design decisions stay grounded in what’s real.
- AI communication strategy. Helping you develop the narrative, the channels, and the cadence that brings people into the story rather than leaving them to write their own.
From first hellos to fond farewells. And every moment in between.
The organisations that get the AI transition right won’t just be the ones who moved fastest. They’ll be the ones whose people felt held through it. That’s the opportunity we collectively have.