How Lucas, People Analyst at Alan, Introduced Dust to his HR Team

Founded in 2016, Alan is an insurer and digital health platform connecting millions to healthcare professionals. It aims to simplify access to care by combining technology and human expertise. Alan operates in France, Spain, and Belgium, with plans to expand into Canada. After raising €173 million in Series F funding led by Belgian bank Belfius, Alan is now valued at €4 billion.

Lucas Picot, a people analyst on Alan's HR team, specializes in data and AI. In early 2024, he took on the task of increasing AI adoption across Alan's 30-person HR department. The team's AI familiarity ranged from tech enthusiasts to complete novices. Lucas saw an opportunity to showcase AI benefits to Alan's entire 600+ workforce.

His challenge: How could he encourage swift AI adoption while prioritizing growth, engagement, wellbeing, and productivity?

"My role is in 'people analytics.' It's not a role you'll find in every company, but my role is about two main points. The first part is AI—introducing AI, increasing AI adoption within my team, and developing AI products. The second part is data—I'm looking at data to improve our HR decisions, to help team leads get to know their team better and make clearer and more informed decisions."

Multi-pronged Strategy for AI Adoption

Lucas' team invested six months to increase AI usage, processes, and HR use cases across Alan's teams. Their approach included:

1. Personal outreach: Lucas identified late AI adopters and met with them individually, sharing simple use cases in casual settings. He sought to understand their hesitations and provided examples relevant to their work.
2. Weekly AI newsletter: Lucas started with one simple use case per week, such as explaining Google Sheets functions, and gradually increased complexity.
3. Surveys: To assess colleagues' AI understanding and tailor the educational approach.

"Most of the time they have good reasons because they don't see why they should use it, so that's why you want to share some little use cases. And continue to ask questions in the following weeks and give them knowledge, and more knowledge, and more knowledge. If half of it is not read at all, the other half will be read and will trigger some ideas in their minds."

Choosing Dust to Meet Alan's Needs

Alan decided to use Dust and leverage its capabilities for all teams. Lucas prefers Dust because it provides access to all models and allows him to use LLMs he couldn't access previously. He found that he preferred Claude to GPT-4 and discovered that he didn't need to enter system prompts at the beginning of each conversation.

The HR team created several custom Dust assistants:

1. "PeopleOnCall": Answers employees' HR-related questions via Slack. It's connected to Notion, where Alan stores its knowledge, and is saving the HR team 30% of the time they used to spend answering questions. Read their LinkedIn Post.
2. Human Resources Business Partner assistant: Helps team leads with complex HR questions regarding team leading, management, difficult employee situations, performance, engagement… Empowering them while reducing the need to consult the People team directly
3. Employee Review assistants: Summarize weekly self-recaps called "Sun, Fire, and A Plus Objectives" (SFA's), reformat them for mid-year reviews, and incorporate guidelines to write effective self assessments.
4. Feedback & review assistants: Helps Alaners formulate deep, actionable and thoughtful feedback based on non violent communication principles and Alan’s feedback documentation.
5. AI Newsletter assistant: Drafts articles or use cases for Lucas's weekly AI newsletter based on AI news topics he provides.

"And I go to that assistant. I give the ideas and it just drafts almost the perfect AI news, and I just have to upload it. So that's really cool. You could do something very similar with a LinkedIn post. If you are posting on social media, you can give all of the best posts you can find."

Successful AI Adoption with Dust

With the adoption of Dust and gradual educational efforts, Lucas' team at Alan improved their AI usage by 4x. From the last quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2024, AI usage increased significantly. Now, 100% of the HR team uses AI daily.

"As a team, take the time. Because the time you take at this moment will be much more powerful once you pass the moment when everyone is using AI. So for me, that's the main thing. Share news. Share knowledge everywhere, every day, every week. And put people directly on this. Put them in front of Dust and let them try, try, try. Get an assistant, do an assistant. It won't work? Try to improve the prompt, try to change the model, try to change the creativity of the model, things like that."

For more stories about how other teams at Alan are incorporating Dust AI into their workflows, you can read about how Vincent, an engineer at Alan, uses Dust to streamline developer workflows.