Rethinking EX: Why Agentic AI Is the Future of Listening to Your People
As HR leaders, we’re constantly told to “listen more” — to our people, to the data, to the culture. But what if we’ve been listening in the wrong places? What if the most powerful insights about our workforce aren’t sitting in our survey results, but are already out there — in the open — just waiting to be understood?
In this blog, we explore a new frontier in Employee Experience by moving beyond surveys with the help of Agentic AI. These artificial intelligence systems are designed to make decisions without direct human intervention, based on their goals or tasks. They can take actions and adapt to their environment to achieve predefined objectives
Katarina Coppe of Welliba and Karin van Roy of Arvesta explore how Agentic AI can give HR teams access to a truly holistic, real-time view of EX — one that reflects how employees actually feel, not just what they’re willing to share in a questionnaire.
If you're rethinking how to listen, lead, and act on what really matters to your people — this is your starting point.
The Old Ways of Listening Are No Longer Enough
For decades, HR leaders have relied on surveys to measure specific topics or outcomes of employee experience. Engagement scores, pulse surveys, Net Promoter Scores — all useful, all familiar. But here’s the truth: the traditional approach is showing its limits. Surveys take time. They rely on the questions we think to ask. They risk bias, survey fatigue, and most importantly — they often miss the real story.
What if there were another way? One that listens to the unfiltered voice of your people, benchmarked in real time, and grounded in science?
That’s where Agentic AI comes in.
Evolution and Functionality of Agentic AI in Employee Experience
At Welliba, we’ve always believed in human-centred, science-backed solutions. Our original EX+ platform helps organisations understand the internal drivers of employee experience through traditional survey methods. But in building our next generation platform — EXcelerate — we asked a bold question:
What if you could understand employee experience without asking a single survey question?
EXcelerate does just that. It uses Agentic AI to tap into external data — from employee review platforms, social commentary, even news stories — and maps that data against our behavioural science-based EX model. It’s fast, insightful, and refreshingly honest.
Unlike many AI tools that simply perform sentiment analysis, our Agentic AI solution goes further. It interprets unstructured data in a structured, psychometric way, treating extremes as extremes and elevating what matters most.
Organisational Adoption: The Arvesta Case
When Arvesta, a diverse and people-centric agribusiness, partnered with Welliba, they weren’t facing a crisis. Quite the opposite — their internal survey results were excellent, with 90%+ engagement scores and high participation.
But that raised a different kind of challenge: How do we know those results reflect reality?
CHRO Karin van Roy wanted to test the internal view against the external one. Were they really the employer they believed themselves to be? Were they being perceived that way by talent, candidates, and former employees?
With EXcelerate, Arvesta received comprehensive competitive insights in less than a week — something that would have taken months using traditional methods. It helped validate their evolving brand identity post-AVEVE, benchmarked them against competitors, and revealed where their EVP truly resonated — and where it didn’t.
Beyond Internal Feedback: Embracing the Outside-In Perspective
One of the most powerful aspects of Agentic AI is that it can understand what people say when they’re not being asked. Yes, online feedback can be extreme. But when treated properly — with context, filtering, and evidence-based analysis — it becomes a goldmine of insight. People are often more candid externally than they are within the walls of their own organisation.
This “outside-in” approach doesn’t replace internal surveys. It complements them. It adds a dimension of authenticity that internal tools sometimes lack — and it does so quickly, efficiently, and at a fraction of the cost.
Solving Today’s HR Challenges with EXcelerate
What makes EXcelerate different isn’t just its speed or efficiency — it’s the depth of what it uncovers. It doesn’t just surface problems; it shows you where to act, and how.
It analyses both:
- Personal factors: like resilience, connectedness, and purpose
- Organisational factors: such as culture, communication, leadership, and the physical work environment
It provides actionable intelligence across areas HR leaders care most about:
- Employee Experience: What matters most — and where to invest
- Diversity & Inclusion: Where your narrative aligns (or misaligns) with reality
- Psychosocial risks: Stress, burnout, and the early warning signals of disengagement
- Leadership effectiveness: How people really experience your leaders
- Loyalty and turnover: Where you're strong — and where you're vulnerable
For Arvesta, the insights helped shape not only HR strategies but also communications, employer branding, and even M&A planning.
Reflections: What We Get Wrong — and What to Do Instead
Common Mistakes HR Still Makes:
- Over-relying on surveys without questioning what is and what is not being said.
- Assuming high scores always equal high performance — without external validation.
- Underestimating the importance of managing EX at the level of each individual employee and confusing perks with purpose
What We Should Do Instead:
- Embrace the outside-in: Using external data for extra insight into traditional listening approaches
- Zoom out: Take a holistic view of EX — beyond one tool , one dimension or one score.
- Personalise: Realising that different people and teams experience your culture differently
The Bottom Line
We’re in a new era of HR — one where listening means more than sending out a survey link. It means engaging with the real signals employees are giving, whether inside or outside the organisation.
Agentic AI doesn’t replace human empathy or strategic thinking. It empowers it by giving HR leaders the visibility, agility, and confidence to act — faster and smarter.
Almost all organisations underestimate how much publicly available information reveals about the experience of their employees. Using traditional methods, it is extremely time-consuming and expensive to track all this information down, draw relevant conclusions from it using validated scientific models, and turn those conclusions into immediately usable benchmarks and advice.
With the introduction of Agentic AI, an external view of EX is now available to every organization at a fraction of the cost of most full EX-programs. Which leaves only one question: which organisations can afford to miss out on the future of listening to their people?
The ideas explored in this blog are inspired by insights shared in a recent ZigZagHR podcast, featuring Katarina Coppe, CCO of Welliba and Karin van Roy, CHRO of Arvesta. In the episode, they discuss how Agentic AI is redefining Employee Experience by providing a more authentic and holistic understanding of what truly matters to people. You can listen to the full podcast here.
