Inside Amazon’s method for measuring engagement in the age of AI

An internal comms dashboard can show leaders how many employees opened a message and clicked through. But it can’t interpret and explain them like a strategic communicator can..

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville earlier this year, Dan Kneeshaw, director of content and channels for worldwide operations internal communications at Amazon, spoke about how his team answers those questions and how AI fits into the equation.

“The leaders ask, ‘OK, but how is it landing and how do our employees feel about that message?’” Kneeshaw said. “That really gets into sentiment, and it gets into more of the anecdotal feedback. So it’s not always hard numbers.”

Kneeshaw added that with feedback coming in from around the globe, Amazon leans on AI to keep up.

“What it’s done for us is it’s helped to enable real-time dashboards,” Kneeshaw said. “AI gives us that really fast speed on what’s happening, so we can pivot and adjust quickly, versus the old days, where you had data coming in monthly or quarterly. It was so far behind you, you couldn’t really react in the moment.”