Resolutions, Goals, and the Role AI Can Play in Our Future — Especially in Healthcare

I suspect that many of you are just like me: starting your 2025 focused on health, wellness, and relationships. As I reviewed my 2025 calendar and travel schedule for the year, I began to think about how artificial intelligence (AI) would fit into my personal world. From a professional standpoint, UKG also has been finalizing its strategic vision and goals for 2025, and each organization I work with is doing the same—planning for the year or years ahead to effectively and efficiently achieve their strategic and financial goals. However, as we look to the future and its opportunities, we cannot assume we can achieve these goals with a shrinking workforce or without some personal support. That’s where AI can be a great partner.

We have so much information coming at us in the form of conversations, research, data, books, and journals that it is impossible to keep on top of it all. AI will be that partner, that solution, to guide our daily work and lives in more efficient ways than we can contemplate today.

The Positive Impacts of AI in Life and in the Workplace

Imagine our lives when our personal AI agent listens to our communication and becomes accustomed to our own voice and sentiment. Imagine, as we start every new year, AI serves to us personally our resolutions converted into actions with nudges and insights.

Imagine if our organizational leaders deployed AI in prioritized ways in our work environments so that the manual burden of non-value-added work was eliminated. Imagine if we were all to realize day to day the outcomes of our work—how my efforts today directly impacted one employee to remain with our organization. Or, in my case as a nurse leader for more than four decades, imagine how my clinical expertise allowed a patient to avoid an ICU stay?

To understand the impact and potential of AI, it is critical for all leaders to understand their employees, and especially employees in frontline roles across industries—from healthcare to retail to manufacturing to the public sector. The frontline workforce comprises about 80% of the world’s working population, serving as crucial contributors to organizations, communities, and economies everywhere.

These employees are essential, but organizational expectations are having negative effects on their health and wellness. According to an extensive UKG global study of the frontline workforce, 60% of frontline employees say they’re pressured to be more productive without additional compensation, and 65% feel they have to work long hours in order to make ends meet. It’s little wonder then that 75% of frontline employees also report feeling burned out by their work.

AI has the potential, if designed and used appropriately, to impact these frontline employees’ sentiments directly. However, leaders first must understand the use cases and the problems they are trying to solve with AI. Leaders then can prioritize the use of an AI solution toward the problems that are impactful to the most employees and most costly for the organization. Leaders must fully understand their employees’ needs, preferences, and motivators and use AI to complement their personal skills. AI should sit alongside all workers and not require much additional training to use it.

UKG Bryte, our AI agent, offers our customers the ability to understand their employees deeply. Information and insights on the individual work and collective workplace and culture is now presented to users with clarity. The future of AI is now, and this will only continue to become more intuitive and directional. Consider the following use cases:

• As a manager, I can view my employees’ work behaviors, such as work patterns, conversations, and practices, so that I can support and recognize them more effectively as team members.
• For frontline employees, AI can suggest shifts that they should sign up for that will pay the hourly rate that will support their monthly financial goals and with the team members that most complement their own skills and experience.
• As a manager, I can understand my work culture as it compares with other top-tier, Great Place To Work-Certified organizations and also track improvements in my own areas of responsibility.

The Real Possibilities of AI in Healthcare

AI is especially promising in my field of healthcare. I recently joined several of my colleagues from across healthcare at the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) Foundation Leadership Symposium on Exploring AI for Nurse Leaders. The symposium brought together nursing experts in practice, industry, and academia to discuss some of the major considerations related to AI and the field of nursing.

We explored AI’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities, especially in our field of healthcare, as well as the current regulatory and governance implications of AI and the current and potential future state of AI in actual practice and education. My colleagues and I have detailed our findings from the symposium in this Exploring AI for Nurse Leaders white paper. If you are a nurse or part of a healthcare organization and are interested in learning more about how AI can help transform the critical work you do every day, I invite you to read about our findings.

These Leadership Symposium Proceedings highlight the major themes and recommendations presented by three expert panels, which each explored a different aspect of AI and nursing. I hope that these themes and recommendations will provide critical guidance to nursing leaders as you prepare to practice and lead in a rapidly changing but exciting healthcare environment.

The Future Work-Life Opportunities with AI

When I step back and think about AI and our future, I am struck with a couple of things. AI will add to our own capabilities, not replace them. Organizations that place innovation and transformation in the hands of employees will be more successful. As the labor market remains challenged, AI is the solution that will support our employees to work more efficiently and to focus on work that really matters to them. As individuals, we are being tasked to take charge of our life and work. AI is just one more tool that can empower us to be the best we can be as individuals.

Our purpose at UKG is people. With AI as our partner, each one of us and our organizations are at a time when we can only become greater. No longer will our resolutions be once a year. With evolving technology like AI, we will continue to grow and flourish every day of the year.