Google’s monthly ‘TGIF’ (short for Thank God its Friday) meetings were once looked forward to by the employees but not anymore. At these town-hall meetings, the employees posed questions, often tough ones, which the leaders of the organisation were required to field.
Dory, an internal system was used by employees to submit their questions. In fact, Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google himself would answer the questions that received the maximum votes on the system.
However, now, Dory has been replaced by Ask, an artificial intelligence (AI) based system, which summarises similar questions and makes them easy for leaders to answer.
In other words, the questions are summarised and made more comfortable to handle. Therefore, leaders are able to dodge the more specific, and at times uncomfortable, and pointed comments, as reported by BI.
While employees are able to see the individual questions that have been summarised, they can only upvote the summarised questions, which is being seen as a way to somewhat dilute the pointedness of the more specific individual questions. Employees feel that Ask is keeping leaders from engaging closely with the audience.
According to Fortune, the company maintains that Ask is being used simply to summarise similar questions, so that there is no unnecessary repetition; that it is only making the system more efficient; and that leaders continue to face tough questions. The company assures that the feedback of the employees will be considered while trying to improve the system further.