Growing up the sandbox was full of treasure: weird shaped rocks, pillbugs, coins, tiny plastic toys left and forgotten by a previous visitor. It’s a place of wonder for children, provided the neighborhood alley cat doesn’t also bury treasure there.

Sandboxes are small plots dedicated to play, creation, and sometimes destruction, especially in service of building something greater. It’s an apt analogy for a space created for employees to play with AI at work.

Rather than rely solely on IT departments or outside consultants to implement AI tools across the organization, some companies are creating internal ‘sandboxes’ of sorts that provide employees with the space to experiment, tinker, and even build their own applications, and are finding it’s a great way to center an AI strategy.

Thinking about AI from the ground up rather than top down helps with adoption inside the organization. It can ease anxieties about AI’s place at work and how humans fit into the new paradigm. It also can further innovation from inside the company, with the aid of the people who actually do the work: your employees.

For more on good ways your employees can experiment with AI, keep reading here.—AD

Will AI replace my job?

This is a question that’s weighed heavily on the minds of HR professionals in recent years, as the field is considered ripe for disruption due to technologies like ChatGPT. Already, HR teams in some companies are getting insight into how their roles can be at least partially replaced by AI, particularly when it comes to areas like total rewards.

IBM has seen a number of promising use cases for incorporating AI into the HR function and is now using those stories to help attract new customers, according to Steve Moss, director with watsonx Americas, the company’s AI portfolio.

The company deploys an AI agent called “AskHR” that fields questions from 270,000 individuals on a daily basis about everything from IBM’s maternity leave policy to employment verification letter requests, Moss said during a May 20 presentation at WorldatWork’s Total Rewards conference in Orlando, Florida.

For more on whether AI will be a net positive for HR leaders when it comes to total rewards, keep reading here.—CV

Dozens of companies have retreated from DEI in recent months, while others, including Apple, and JPMorgan have doubled down. As companies continue to deliberate over how to approach DEI amid the quickly shifting reality, new research suggests that abandoning DEI programs could be risky, and most executives plan on sticking with them.

Weighing the risks. Abandoning DEI programming could have employee retention, legal, and financial risks, according to a new survey from the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the NYU School of Law, and workplace gender equity firm, Catalyst.

Some 62% of C-suite executives believe their organizations are holding steady or increasing their DEI efforts compared to 24% of employees, who think DEI is integrated less. Most C-suite executives also believe that DEI initiatives result in better business performance and will continue to have a positive business impact long-term.

For more insights on how C-suite execs view DEI efforts, keep reading here.—KP