HR startup Culture Amp is using AI to predict how productive new employees will be and how long they’ll stay

HR tech startup Culture Amp has developed an AI-based predictive tool to forecast productivity and turnover risk in new employees.

Rod Hamilton, Culture Amp’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer said the Foresight Engine, unveiled this week at the company’s annual global conference, Culture First, comes out of the recent acquisition of performance management venture Zugata Inc.

“With Foresight Engine, leaders are empowered to predict employee outcomes related to engagement, performance, and retention. It then equips them with the insights they need to take action to drive more successful outcomes,” he said.

The prediction algorithm driving Foresight Engine is based on insights from more than 2,300 companies, 3 million employees and 165 million data points from onboarding, to engagement, wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, and performance reviews.

Culture Amp will embed the product throughout its predictive analytics, organisational network analysis, and natural language processing tools.

Hamilton said it will inform leaders and HR on underlying links between engagement and performance within their organisations as well as empower managers to take action and drive positive change throughout teams.

One of the companies Culture Amp has been developing Foresight Engine with is digital product design company InVision. The company’s Chief People Officer, Mark Frein, said InVision is now able to predict whether someone will be a high performer 30 days into their tenure.

“This insight allows us to intervene early to set them up for success,” he said.

“Perhaps for the first time, we now understand the efficacy of our onboarding processes and can clearly show the ROI of investing in our employees early in their tenure.”

Among the insights InVision gathered from using Foresight Engine during induction was that new employees who answered favorably to the question, ‘I am feeling productive’, in the onboarding survey were found to be 4.2 times more likely to become high-performers, while those who answered favorably to ‘My induction program was thorough and effective’, were 3.8 times more likely to be high-performers.