In the world of remote work and rapidly advancing
Doug Camplejohn is the founder and CEO of Airspeed, a platform dedicated to creating apps that improve employee connection and recognition in the workplace. Their latest launch, "Coffee Talk," is an AI-powered app for Slack that matches employees across different teams and seniority levels for weekly or biweekly conversations, either in-person or over Zoom. After learning more about the employee and what topics they would like to discuss, Airspeed's AI not only offers a list of matches but provides conversation starters, offers meeting times that work around both parties' schedules and uses feedback to create better matches.
"This app is really designed to help you connect with folks in your company that you might not ordinarily interact with," says Camplejohn. "Especially if your company is working hybrid or remote these days, you have less opportunities to just bump into somebody in the cafeteria like you might have in the past."
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For Camplejohn, it's clear that without employee connections, it's easier for workers to feel isolated and even ignored by their workplace, leading to lower
"The number one reason why employees feel dissatisfied or leave their job is because they don't feel connected," says Camplejohn. "[Employee] productivity really comes from people who are building connections — where the relationship becomes a trust relationship, as opposed to a fear relationship."
In other words, employees can't survive off of hierarchical relationships alone, which may be the case if the most consistent workplace interaction they have is when they directly report to their boss. Camplejohn hopes that Coffee Talk can help employees connect with colleagues or gain mentors outside their team while encouraging conversations around skill and career growth as well as shared personal interests and hobbies.
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Coffee Talk can also serve as an opportunity to introduce AI to an entire workforce — an introduction that is necessary now that AI tools are advancing at lightning speed, underlines Camplejohn.
"AI is bigger than any technology I have ever experienced in my lifetime, including the internet, mobile phones and social media," he says. "AI is going to touch every aspect of work. Imagine if everyone in the company has their own personal assistant or chief of staff that works 24/7."
But not everyone may be used to prompting or guiding an assistant effectively, notes Camplejohn. With a tool like Coffee Talk, employees can begin understanding how to input guidelines and feedback that leads to great matches and conversations, a skill that employees will need to develop in order to use platforms like ChatGPT for work.
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"If you've never had an assistant, you may not know how to prompt someone to do a task," says Camplejohn. "You need to be able to prompt something like ChatGPT as efficiently and precisely as possible."
Camplejohn warns employers that they are witnessing the meeting of two macro trends no one can outrun: remote work and AI. Employees need the tools to thrive outside the office, and AI can help, if employers are willing to integrate the technology into their workflow.
After remote work, the second tectonic shift of AI is coming to the forefront and it's going to turn work upside down," says Camplejohn. "This is the most exciting career moment in my life, watching these two huge tectonic plates hit each other."
