Decoding What Moves People: A New Model for Engagement in the Age of AI

David Kristal grew up in Minnesota, and he’s all too familiar with what water can become. “At 32 degrees, it’s a solid block of ice. At room temperature, it flows through our hands, and above 212 degrees, it’s vapor in the air, invisible,” he said. People change states too, Kristal says. 

The same employee who shows up energized on Monday can be distracted on Tuesday by a new baby, a rough commute, or a boss they don’t get along with. Traditional employee engagement initiatives have historically operated under the assumption of a static environment, ignoring changing circumstances. “The future of workplace engagement enables us to tailor every response, not just to the individual employee, but to the temperature, to the moment. Context changes the game,” Kristal, the founder and CEO of Augeo, said. 

Kristal spoke with Katie Cunningham, the director of product at Augeo, about this during a thought leadership spotlight titled “Decoding What Moves People: A New Model for Engagement in the Age of AI” at From Day One’s Austin conference.

When Intelligence Becomes a Utility

Kristal started the conversation by acknowledging real fears companies and their employees have, from data leakage to the commoditization of intelligence. He contends that these two priorities are not mutually exclusive: organizational leaders can actively champion regulation and transparency while simultaneously driving AI adoption forward at full speed.

He notes that every few centuries, civilization’s operating system undergoes a complete rewrite, moving from the printing press to the industrial engine, and later to the internet. “Intelligence itself has become an accessible utility,” he said.

Engagement programs have always relied on personalization and data signals, according to Kristal. What’s new is the ability to pull those signals from many more sources and process them almost instantly. “For the first time, we can decode what will move millions of people millions at a time and one by one in real time,” he said.

Augeo, which Kristal says has built engagement solutions for almost three decades and serves about 100 Fortune 500 companies, has put money behind that belief. The company sold its card-linking subsidiary Figg to JPMorgan Chase in 2022, and Kristal says Augeo has never invested more than it does now. In early September, it announced a collaboration with SpaceXAI to integrate Grok’s reasoning into THEO. While Kristal notes that the company maintains a platform-agnostic approach, it continues to explore strategic technology partnerships.

One Operating System, Many Programs

Kristal’s ambitions extend beyond HR. He asked the audience to imagine AT&T, not an Augeo client, trying to sell more accessories in its stores. Today, that goal might spawn three efforts: an incentive program for store employees, a customer loyalty program, and a vendor program, each in its own silo.

“Our north star vision is to be the engagement operating system for the enterprise, meaning the full company,” Kristal said. For that model, a single shared intelligence layer serves HR, customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and customer support simultaneously. He hedged the bet candidly: “If we’re wrong, and each of our programs remain siloed, that works too.”

Signals That Used to Be Invisible

Context is what makes orchestration matter to people leaders. “Maybe an employee has a new baby. Maybe their route to work is disrupted. Maybe a friend got a promotion, and they didn’t. These are all previously invisible elements that affect how people might react in the workplace.”

THEO reads those signals throughout an enterprise and acts on them. Kristal describes it as humanizing technology rather than a replacement for people. “We’re leveraging AI tech to actually humanize the workplace experience because it recognizes humans are always changing, evolving,” he added.

Augeo is building two architectures around THEO. The first is what Kristal called the world’s first commerce engine: a conversational, fully personalized interface for redeeming rewards. It draws on data that companies already share with Augeo from their Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS). “There’s no creepy data effect,” he said. The second architecture connects THEO to the tools where people already work, such as Slack, Teams, CRM platforms, and HRIS systems.

From Systems of Record to Action

THEO, Cunningham says, is meant to “shift the experience from systems of record to systems of action.” Legacy platforms wait for someone to enter data; THEO continuously analyzes signals and recommends next steps.

Cunningham’s demo followed three people at a grocery chain. Maria, a regional director overseeing 30 stores, gets a Teams message as her day starts: her peak-season program sits at 83% of target, but Store 412 in Riverside is at 62% and has lost momentum for 10 days. THEO recommends that John, the store’s manager, launch a weeklong sales incentive sprint. It flags another store that has held pace all quarter and drafts a note recognizing its manager, which Maria tweaks and sends. This is automation in service of judgment: Maria still makes the call.

“Where it might have taken Maria days to notice this performance dip at one of her stores, THEO sees this signal immediately, understands the context, and helps her act,” Cunningham elaborated.

John, who manages 80 associates, receives the sprint and has THEO personalize the announcement for each associate using their individual performance and profile data. “Without THEO’s analysis of individual performance data and knowledge of what motivates each team member, John would have had to deploy a one-size-fits-all incentive across his 80 associates,” she said.

Cunningham’s demo ended with Alex, a checkout associate who works mostly from a handheld device. His challenge: convert four more loyalty perk signups at the register to earn 500 points. THEO knows he loves music and movies, so it suggests concert tickets or a movie night bundle. By day’s end, Alex redeems his points for the movie night because his kids will love it.

“This is where personalization moves beyond a segment or just a campaign,” Cunningham said. “That is a system that brings intelligence into the flow of work every single day, helping people make better decisions and act in the moment.”

Moving Fast Without Giving Ground

Kristal closed by sharing the mindset Augeo has held for nearly 30 years: “What got us to where we are today will not get us to our next collectively. This is not the next, literally, but a quantum leap forward.”

Speed in decision-making currently outweighs any individual choice, says Kristal. For the engagement sector, he identifies two lasting competitive edges: deep domain expertise and robust underlying infrastructure. The first is know-how: “We have decades of proprietary engagement expertise that off-the-shelf agents can’t crawl and will never be able to crawl,” Kristal said. The second is infrastructure, the systems for recognition, badging, and redemption that the agent world lacks. Leaders shouldn’t give those away, he says. Instead, they should work side by side with AI agents while preserving the human element of the workforce experience.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Augeo, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.

(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)