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Publicis Sapient on AI: A three-step guide to psychological safety
Uncertainty around AI is natural, but organizations need a psychologically safe environment for their employees to innovate and experiment, says Publicis Sapient’s Kameshwari Rao.
Kameshwari Rao, Global Chief People Officer at international digital consulting firm Publicis Sapient, remembers very clearly her ‘lightbulb moment’ with AI: “Around six years ago, our engineering leader gave us a demonstration,” she recalls. “He used an AI tool for a piece of work that, at the time, took a team of four about 15 days to complete. It took him 15 minutes. That was my wow moment.”
Rao understood that the advent of AI had profound implications for Publicis Sapient, bringing huge opportunities but also significant anxiety for the workforce.
“We recognized the need to build AI literacy and fluency,” she says. “We wanted people to feel able to trust AI tools and feel confident about how to use them safely. We also saw a need to address people’s fears that they would just become irrelevant.”
More than just another tool
Rao describes a common issue around AI that has become more significant than any technological barrier. Unless employees feel psychologically safe, it is unrealistic to expect them to engage with, let alone embrace, the technology. Inevitably, user hesitation will impede organizational efforts to explore AI.
In one recent study sponsored by technology firm Infosys Topaz, 84% of business leaders said they had observed a clear link between higher levels of psychological safety and measurably improved outcomes from AI initiatives.
Rao does not believe that firms can treat AI like any other new technology. Rather, she sees it as marking a shift in the work environment that prompts people to ask themselves some fundamental questions.
“People’s identities are at stake,” she argues. “We’re all rooted in our knowledge and ability to do our jobs, and it’s something we take for granted. Now, something has come along that is replacing that and asking us difficult questions about our abilities. No wonder that there is so much fear.”
The good news for employees is that, as Rao points out, human intelligence has been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years, developing characteristics such as empathy, resilience, and judgment to adapt to a changing environment. The role of leaders like her, she believes, is to remind people that they possess those irreplaceable human qualities.
Work on the mindset shift began within three months of that first eyebrow-raising leadership team AI meeting.
A workplace of greater safety
In practice, that requires businesses to commit to increased communication and support that considers each employee’s personal reaction to the technology and allows them to adapt at their own pace.
At Publicis Sapient, Rao has focused on three simultaneous strands of AI change: the shift to a mindset of curiosity rather than anxiety about AI, building confidence, and integrating AI tools into everyday jobs.
Work on the mindset shift began within three months of that first eyebrow-raising leadership team AI meeting. Rao used a company-wide town hall to demonstrate AI tools and use cases and encourage employees to experiment with them. “We wanted to begin the conversation by getting everybody to have a bit of fun with AI,” she explains. “It was about building familiarity.”
She followed the town hall with a dedicated campaign, AI Habits. Rao and her team presented information across multiple formats, from posters in the office to prompts on Teams calls. The goal was to pique curiosity, with initiatives based on psychological research into habit formation, such as James Clear’s best-selling book, Atomic Habits.
At the same time, Publicis Sapient prioritized experimentation, getting people to think about the skills and training they might need to make the most of AI. One useful approach here was gamification. The company introduced “Curiosity Quests” – weekly games in which employees use AI tools to complete challenges.
The first game required them to “navigate the deep” in a virtual submarine. Fun, for sure, but the broader goal was to encourage employees to notice patterns and ask better questions. “It’s just another tactic that helps take away the fear,” Rao adds. According to Rao, a critical factor in success was that AI training was tied directly to live client work, not delivered as a separate program.
In the third AI initiative, the company’s goal was to instill the use of AI tools as a productive routine. For example, the company’s Latin American arm designed an “AI Caravan” that has toured the business offering demos and workshops. “We’re saying, how do you go beyond the simple use cases to support contextual judgment and decision-‑making?”
Critically, Rao argues, companies should not see these three AI initiatives as one-and-done exercises: “At any given point, you will have people at different stages in all three areas – everyone’s change cycle is different.”
Rao and her colleagues have framed AI as an ongoing learning journey, rather than a finite implementation process. They’ve explicitly recognized that uncertainty around AI is natural, and seek to address it by building understanding and competence over time.
A related challenge, Rao adds, has been to set boundaries. “Most people are rightly concerned about using AI ethically and responsibly,” she says. “So, if we want to build trust, we need to set out what that looks like in practice.”
In the end, Rao believes that no single initiative will create psychological safety around AI.
Listening and sharing
There is plenty that organizations can do to track the success of their efforts to build psychological safety. Rao points to a range of listening tools that Publicis Sapient uses to understand whether employees are feeling confident in the workplace – or perhaps they are just getting more and more stressed.
These tools include a happiness survey, conducted every six months across the business using a set of 15 or so questions to track how staff are feeling. Questions about the extent to which they can speak their mind, raise concerns with managers, and access the tools they need to do their jobs speak directly to psychological safety.
“The HR team has recognized that we need to measure attitudes – and do so over time – and to be as data-centric as possible,” says Rao. She also flags the importance of leadership role modeling. “As leaders, we need to be willing to talk about our own fears and vulnerabilities, and to share stories about how we’re tackling them in the context of AI,” she says. Publicis Sapient’s CEO was one of the company’s first employees to voice such anxieties in the early town halls on AI.
In the end, Rao believes that no single initiative will create psychological safety around AI. Rather, it will take a spread of different, ongoing measures. But there is an opportunity to energize the workforce and create a new sense of excitement.
“Once we convince people they still have a role to play, we can give them the building blocks to really take advantage of the power of AI,” Rao says. “We can help them to identify all those other things they could be doing in their roles – because they’ve got so much more to offer.”
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