From measuring engagement to acting on it: inside Eletive’s AI roadmap

Surveys close, results come in, and by the time anyone has worked out what the numbers mean, the moment to act has often passed. At AI in HR 2026, Eletive’s CTO Maria Hall shared how we’re using AI in our platform to close that gap, and what’s coming next.

Engagement isn’t a nice to have

Only one in five employees are engaged at work, according to Gallup. That matters, because the upside of getting engagement right is large and measurable. Gallup links highly engaged teams to 23% higher profit, 78% less sick leave and 18% higher productivity. Even in organisations where turnover is already low, engaged teams see 51% lower turnover.

Most organisations already have the data to act on this. What they lack is the time and support to turn it into action quickly enough to matter. As Maria put it, the gap between measuring engagement and acting on it in time is where AI comes in.

Why we started with a copilot

When we continued developing our AI in the Eletive platform, we didn’t want to add another dashboard. We wanted something people could have a conversation with.

Eletive Copilot works just like that, like a conversation. No filters, no digging through charts. You ask a question the way you’d ask a colleague, and the answer is based on your own team’s and your organisation’s data. Insights come with next steps, not just numbers.

That focus on managers is deliberate. According to Gallup, 30% of employees are engaged when their manager doesn’t actively support them in using AI. With that support, it rises to 48%. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index points the same way: 67% of AI’s impact comes from organisational and management factors, compared with 32% from individual use. So Copilot sits where managers already work.

Watch Maria's full session from AI in HR, on AI powered people intelligence.

Four areas where AI makes a difference

1. Deeper insights

Eletive Copilot can analyse your survey results and answer follow-up questions in your own language, so global organisations get one consistent view of what people are saying. Comments AI, already part of the platform, analyses open-text comments automatically, surfacing themes, sentiment and how they shift over time. For a large organisation with 20,000 comments, that’s the difference between reading a summary and not reading the comments at all.

2. Less admin

The AI writing assistant helps employees phrase feedback clearly, and more anonymously. It also helps managers draft thoughtful, empathetic replies in seconds instead of minutes. That’s especially useful for newer managers still finding their voice. Next up: Copilot proposing actions, objectives and survey questions for you, and exporting results straight to Excel or PowerPoint for team and board meetings. After that, AI will flag sensitive comments automatically, so anonymity rules stay intact.

3. Knowing what to prioritise

When everything in your results feels urgent, it’s hard to know where to start. Copilot already gives advice right where you’re looking: on a score, a trend or a segment. Next, it will suggest concrete next steps tailored to your team’s actual results, not generic advice. Further ahead, the goal is to estimate which actions will move the needle most.

4. Empowering leaders at every level

Managers can already ask questions in plain language. The team is now working on helping Copilot understand your organisation’s specifics, so its advice fits how you actually work, and on generating reports for team meetings. Later, Copilot will create charts on demand, explain what they show, and run even sharper analyses, including correlation analysis.

What it looks like in practice

In a live demo, Maria asked Copilot questions HR teams ask all the time:

• Are there any correlations between eNPS and drivers in the latest survey?

• What actions do you recommend, based on the last three engagement surveys?

• Does our change management survey correlate with the engagement survey we ran at the same time?

• What are new joiners saying about their first 90 days?

Each one returned the data, the key observations and a recommendation. Connecting different surveys in the platform.

See Marias full session.

Advisory, not autonomous

People data is sensitive, and HR teams are right to ask hard questions about AI. Here’s how we’ve built ours:

• Access follows permissions. Every answer respects each person’s data access. Never more, never less than they’re allowed to see.

• Anonymity rules stay intact. The anonymity and filter settings you already use apply to every AI feature automatically.

• A human confirms before anything is created. Copilot suggests, you decide. The only exception is Comments AI, which analyses comments automatically.

• No customer data is used to train AI.

• Built for evolving regulation. We track EU AI Act developments and deliberately keep our AI advisory rather than autonomous.

As Maria put it, AI is the amplifier of self-leadership, not a replacement for it.

Eletive Copilot Compliance and Security Overview

Learn how Eletive Copilot turns engagement data into clear, actionable insight while keeping privacy, security, GDPR, and AI compliance at the core.

Download

Where we’re heading

Eletive’s AI journey so far has moved in clear steps. It started with a general assistant that answered questions about the platform. Then Copilot got access to your own team and company data. Right now, the team is working on suggested actions: Copilot drafting objectives, actions and one-to-one agendas, with you approving every step. After that comes visual reasoning, with charts generated inline and the reasoning explained.

AI is also changing how we build. Maria’s team uses it in their own development work, which means new features are reaching customers faster than before.