With 2026 underway, organizations face the challenge of getting their people motivated and prepared for the year ahead. As the ways we work quickly change, it’s never been more important to keep employees upskilled, agile, and driven to succeed. It’s all about enabling Human Success by unlocking AI-personalized growth and performance.
Let’s face it, employee engagement has tanked. Now, uncertainty about the future has people eyeing the emergency exits. Only investing in Human Success can build trust and get your people back on track for one of the most decisive years of the decade.
What we mean by “Human Success”
If you’re not familiar with the term “Human Success,” that might be because it’s something we’re pioneering here at Zensai. Simply put, Human Success is a new operating model and category of people management. It combines learning, engagement, and performance into a single approach. And the secret to all of it hinges on unlocking AI-powered HR and talent management.
So, we hear you ask, why not keep learning, engagement, and performance separate? What does it matter so long as you have all three?
That’s because learning, engagement, and performance inevitably impact one another no matter how you try to separate them.
When you remove engagement, employees stop caring about training and performance management. Get rid training, their performance dips and they become disengaged due to frustration. Take away performance management and you lose your ability to spot essential training needs.
Take engagement for example. According to Gallup’s global employee engagement indicator, engagement sits at just 21% worldwide. Although American employee engagement is a bit higher (31%), Gallup’s further US-based insights still shed some light on the learning and performance connection:
- Less than half (47%) know what’s expected at work.
- Just over one third (34%) get to do what they do best.
- Less than a third (31%) have someone who encourages personal development.
- 31% of employees had talks about their progress in the past six months.
- Only 32% had learning and growth opportunities in the past year.
How Human Success makes a difference
If learning, engagement, and performance sound like difficult things to keep in balance, that’s because they can be. But, just as issues with one can affect its fellows, improvements to one can also amplify the others.
Take improving employee training for instance. Better workplace learning can boost both engagement and productivity by providing new skills and clearing personal blockers. That’s just one example of the power of Human Success.
Unlocking AI-personalized growth for Human Success
Human Success is about fundamentally reshaping the employee experience. But you’ll need AI to fully achieve this for reasons we’ll get into.
We need to understand what drives people at work besides obvious extrinsic motivators like money. There are obviously countless elements of the employee experience we could talk about, but let’s focus on two of the most important:
- Growth: Growth plays a crucial role in both performance and long-term job satisfaction. Upskilling employees gives them the capability to meet new challenges while opening them up to new areas of work that keep their role from feeling stale. Growth opportunities also improve promotability and prevent employees from feeling they’re at a dead-end.
- Purpose: Nobody wants to feel like their job is pointless. That’s why a sense of purpose is essential for people to take pride in their work. Since we can’t all save lives or create art for a living, providing purpose at work is more commonly a matter of showing employees how their efforts impact the larger business.
The role of AI
In a work culture based on Human Success, each role has a clear purpose, and every employee gets opportunities to learn and grow. What makes this challenging is that you must align growth opportunities and purpose to the individual. One-size-fits-all won’t work here.
This is why unlocking AI-powered Human Success is so important. While it’s easy enough for a HR team to personalize things like employee learning or workflows in a small business, scalability is another matter.
AI tools process vast quantities of data at incredible speeds. They excel at spotting behavioral trends and making personalized recommendations for optional training and even career development.
This takes the burdens of data collection and analysis away from HR teams. Without that extra strain, they can instead focus on delivering personalized opportunities and experiences based on actionable insights.
Of course, we appreciate that this is all quite top-level. So, let’s dive a little deeper by looking at how AI tools support learning and performance management using our Human Success Platform as a reference.
Learning journeys: Personalized paths to capability
Calling employee training critical for business success would be a massive understatement. Training during onboarding is essential for setting up new hires in their roles, while further training can help established employees adapt in a changing workplace and grow into new roles or responsibilities.
This would be easy enough if everyone was training to move up the same generic management track, but the reality isn’t that simple. Any reasonably agile business will have a wide number of different career tracks and specialized roles. At the same time, employees may have a wide variety of personal ambitions. So, as mentioned above, it quickly becomes an issue of scalability. So, how can unlocking AI-personalized learning management make a difference?
Personalized learning and career pathways
Learn365 helps HR to promote their courses and employees to overcome choice paralysis by unlocking AI-personalized learning paths and development opportunities. These tailored recommendations are based on the following criteria:
- The employee’s targeted areas of interest.
- Skill taxonomies and role requirements determined by HR.
- Skills gap analysis based on real-time performance data.
AI can even use skills journeys to connect established training courses with informal learning opportunities. For example, coaching or mentorship for more comprehensive employee development. AI-powered content curation delivers these recommendations based on real-time data. They’re even accessible in Microsoft Teams so your people can learn and grow in the flow of work.
AI-powered course creation
Of course, personalizing content curation is only half the battle. You’ve got to have suitable content on-hand to be able to deliver it. The question remains, then, of how to actually produce these courses to meet the diverse demands of ambitious employees.
The answer, somewhat predictably at this point in the article, is Artificial Intelligence. Learn365 comes equipped with an AI-powered course creator that helps you quickly find the most relevant materials in your library.
Don’t have anything suitable? That’s fine! Our course builder uses Copilot (along with PowerPoint and Word) to instantly convert documents and videos into usable course content complete with exercises to test knowledge. That way, you can fill any gap in your content library as soon as you identify it.
Coaching in the flow: Making feedback a daily habit
Research from Gartner in 2024 found that 76% of organizations globally give performance reviews once a year. Yet, anyone who’s experienced traditional performance management can tell you that it has an irritating lack of flow. You might get a review once or twice a year. Beyond that, however, all you get is whatever ad-hoc feedback your boss happens to give you. If you’re lucky.
Enter Perform365. At Zensai, we’ve built our performance management tool on an ethos of frequent feedback. The idea is that any critique or piece of advice is most effective when delivered at the point of impact. In other words, the longer you wait, the less meaning it will have.
Perform365 uses an employee check-in system (which it shares with Engage365) as a source of regular, two-way feedback. They can be any cadence you like, but we strongly recommend running them every week.
Check-ins combine small, personalized question sets about productivity and the employee experience with a built-in goal tracker. Besides being a real-time flow of engagement and performance data, check-ins give managers regular opportunities to give ad-hoc feedback by responding to an employee’s check-in answers.
How AI supports real-time feedback
Perform365 uses AI to support feedback in a few key ways:
- Nudges: In Perform365, AI can deliver nudges through Microsoft Teams or email to remind users to complete their weekly check-ins. This helps to ensure consistent results while preventing managers having to chase them up.
- Review summaries: AI can summarize performance reviews based on check-in data so that employees and managers can tell at a glance what type of discussion it’s going to be. Discussions are much more productive when you’re both on the same page from the start.
- Check-in and goal assistance: One way Perform365 supports managers is through AI-powered coaching and recommendations for goals and check-in questions. Let’s say you’ve got a struggling employee. AI can recommend check-in questions based on what’s worked for similar businesses to help you start communicating. Then you can give them new OKRs based on AI insights that connect their personal strengths to the needs of your organization.
- Analytics: Analysis is what AI is arguably best known for. That’s why our Human Success Platform uses both performance and engagement data. It means that managers can understand why their people thrive or struggle, as well as when to stand back or intervene.
These functions are designed to help organizations to break away from isolated, inconsistent performance management. Instead, Perform365 empowers you to embrace a learning culture founded on real-time feedback and ongoing personal development.
Unlocking AI unleashes Human Success
Right now, everyone is talking about what AI means for people in the workplace. We argue that what it means will largely be determined by the organizations using it. When we embrace AI as a tool to empower humans instead of replacing them, we can create a work culture that’s better positioned to treat people like the individuals they are.
Using AI for Human Success might sound contradictory. In reality, the truth is that it’s an essential foundation for building a more supportive, development-focused workplace that’s future-proofed for the road ahead.
To learn more about the role of AI in Human Success, the ways goal clarity affects engagement and performance, and how you can personalize employee development to the individual, then check out our on-demand webinar, Human Success in the AI era: 5 proven leadership strategies.