Lattice Transforms the Workplace with Habit-Focused AI Agents

Weeks ago, when Sarah Franklin proclaimed that Lattice was in its “refounding” moment, it wasn’t just a catchy phrase—she had her eyes set on reimagining what the people management platform could become in the AI era. While she was initially reserved about what she could disclose, Franklin is opening up and sharing what Lattice is doing to become AI-first and improve employee conversations within every organization.

“Lattice was founded as a cloud company—a SaaS company—and now Lattice is refounded as a ‘people + AI’ company, and that is a transformational statement,” she says in an interview. Franklin explains that Lattice isn’t interested in being a back-office system of record for “drudgery work.” Instead, it sees its path forward as being a foundation of how people actually work, putting the focus less on cyclical things and more on building better habits.

This is the basis of Lattice’s announcements at its Innovation Day—the company is introducing Lattice Habits and enhanced AI agents.

The Significance of Better Habits

“We are with Habits, having our product be AI-first and truly built around how people work, not how information is managed, and we feel it all in our daily lives—we’re being inundated and…exasperated by the information coming at us, and it’s because we’ve lost sight of just how to work together as people,” Franklin states.

Lattice Habits is designed to help employees focus on their strategic professional development goals, not to act as a to-do checklist. Are you aligned with your manager? Do you understand what goals you’re working towards? Do you know how to prioritize your projects and what you should be working on? Franklin believes these are things workers often neglect in their jobs.

“We neglect having the conversations with our colleagues because perhaps they might be hard, or we might be afraid of what they might think,” she states. On the other hand, we might think it’s easier to form habits when it comes to our personal lives—those with New Year’s resolutions may disagree. Nevertheless, Lattice is setting out to “have those habits in the workplace that help you achieve the goals of yourself, your career, and the outcomes that the company has set.”

Focusing on habitual behavior may further differentiate Lattice from its competitors, including Workday, Culture Amp, 15Five, Paylocity, BambooHR, and ADP. It’s a shift away from cyclical tasks that workers often deal with—checking in every quarter, for example, or doing repetitive assignments based on a set schedule. By investing in habits, Lattice aims to help workers develop consistent behavioral patterns, allowing them to focus on what they should be working on and manage their day in a similar manner in which they manage their life or career.

The company describes Lattice Habits as a base application. It’s the “workflow, the model, and the orchestration of the work.” Another way to think about it is that it serves as the North Star for this workplace AI, as it guides employees on their career journey. Franklin calls it the baseline foundation on which her company’s improved agents will be powered.

Lattice Habits will be off by default, leaving administrators in control, a move Franklin says is meant to give businesses agency over whether they want this or not.

Enhanced AI Agents, but at a Cost

Launched in June, Lattice’s AI Agent was built to be “your always-on teammate.” It would answer repetitive HR questions, flag retention risks, surface feedback gaps, and provide timely, but limited, coaching to employees. This month, Lattice made the bot free for all its customers.

When asked what Lattice learned since the rollout, Franklin responded by saying people were frequently asking questions “that you think they would be able to find the answer to on their own.” They’re wondering who their manager is, how they could get a promotion, or what it means when they’re told to be more strategic. She reveals that the top-asked question is, “What should I focus on today?”

“You would think that people would know what they should focus on today,” Franklin wryly observes. “Here’s the thing: We’re going into our daily lives being managed like robots with information that we need to either create or update, and we’re not given time and space for the human to work [and] understand, ‘let me have a conversation with my manager [and] my colleague. Let me understand what’s most important.’”

Now, the company is introducing new capabilities for its AI agent, under a subscription package called AI Agent Plus. Priced at $15 per user per month, these features are designed to make conversations both more meaningful and efficient. Lattice is not discontinuing support for its base agent, describing it as “very valuable.”

“There’s a very clear value that the premium agent provides, and it’s with the agent joining your one-on-ones, having the transcription, then having the notes that are taken turned into actions for you that can help you understand how that conversation went or didn’t go well, if you have follow-up action items, putting them onto your list, putting tit on your calendars, and all that stuff,” Franklin shares. “In addition, there are proactive insights. And so it’s additional processing that’s done on your data to give you those proactive things that can be done for you.”

“It’s very clear in terms of the base agent—it’s really there, if you have questions, you can talk to it. It has the same access to your data,” she adds. “The premium features are really for the agent to join the meetings, to be there with you, to listen, to transcribe, and take action from those meetings.”

Here are some of the premium features available with Lattice AI Agent Plus:

• Capable of joining 1:1 meetings, taking notes, and capturing context
• Providing more in-depth, real-time coaching based on every conversation, drawing from an employee’s past work, along with data from third-party platforms like Workday, JIRA, and Slack
• Creates proactive alignments, nudging managers to show up where it matters, tracks an employee’s progress towards their goals, and flags when projects and tasks deviate from the schedule
• Streamlines the manager and employee relationship by focusing on the meaningful work and conversations that will drive real results

Franklin adds that another benefit Lattice’s AI Agent provides is that everything is secure and compliant with a company’s HR policies.

Ultimately, what Franklin wants everyone to know is that the new Lattice has arrived to bring together people with AI. It’s “a new way to work, and it’s our opportunity to say we’re going to have technology work the way we work as people, and that is the big transformation that’s going to take us through the next decade or more.”

Featured Image: An AI-generated image depicting a knowledge worker with a laptop using AI. Credit: ChatGPT