Setup Considerations: AI Topics
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of AI Topics. It explains:
- Why to set it up.
- How it fits into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What It Is
AI Topics uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI (GenAI) to analyze employee feedback. The system identifies company-specific topics by clustering comments based on meaning rather than using pre-defined categories. It then generates titles and summaries for these clusters to provide granular, actionable insights.
Business Benefits
- Identify Trends: Discover specific themes and issues related to employee sentiment without manual analysis.
- Support Decision Making: Enable leaders to address key challenges and opportunities directly within Peakon.
- Actionable Priorities: Focus on what matters most to teams using sentiment-enriched data and highlighted topics.
Use Cases
- Process a high volume of comments into manageable topics and themes for company-level or large segment analysis.
- Identify Specific Issues: Detect emerging concerns and where they are happening, such as feedback on a specific office relocation or a new policy.
- Cross-Segment Comparison: Compare how different segments feel by enabling topic generation for the segments you're interested in.
- Historical Analysis: Track how sentiment and volume of comments changes over multiple rounds. Manually generate topics for past rounds prior to when you enabled the feature to identify long-term trends.
Questions to Consider
Question | Consideration |
|---|---|
Which attributes should have automatic topic generation? | By default, Workday Peakon generates topics for the Company and Manager contexts. Consider if you need automatic generation for other attributes. Example: Department or Region . Visit Set Up Attributes for Topics Regeneration for more information. |
Who should have access to view AI Topics? | Determine which managers and leaders require access to qualitative themes. You can control access to the Topics page through access control group permissions. |
Do you need to analyze historical survey rounds? | AI Topics can be generated manually for survey rounds that occurred before you enabled the feature. |
What insights can executives gain from the prominence of these high-level themes? | Peakon highlights the top 3 sentiment-agnostic themes (Example: Management , Workload ) based on topic prominence. Consider how these high-level categories will inform your executive reporting. |
Recommendations
- Enable AI Topics in Data Control to ensure insights are ready as soon as a survey round closes.
- Encourage employees to provide detailed feedback, as the system excludes short replies like "yes/no" or "agree."
- Use Manual Topic Regeneration for new segments. If you update your organization structure, manually recalculate topics to reflect the new data.
- Ensure managers have access to comments to see AI Topics.
- Ensure comment translations is enabled for full language coverage (so that topics include comments from all survey languages). For more information, visit Concept: AI Comment Translations.
Requirements
- The model requires rounds with at least 10 quality comments and at least 50 comments present in the Peakon instance across all the rounds to be able to generate AI Topics. Further, even with these 2 requirements met, it is not guaranteed to have topics generated because the clustering algorithm might not identify enough comments with similar semantic meaning.
- Ensure employees are in the correct segments.
Limitations
- Meet the minimum topic size requirement by ensuring each topic has enough comments based on the total number of responses in a round. Example: 5 comments in rounds with fewer than 1,500 total comments.
- Use supported attribute defaults since automatic generation applies only toManagerandCompanycontexts, unless you manually add other attributes in Data Settings.
- Rely on aggregated data at round close because the system calculates topics when the round closes and does not recalculate for late submissions during the soft-close period, unless you trigger it manually.
Connections and Touchpoints
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.