How upscale grocer Buehler’s Fresh Foods unlocked a better employee experience with AI

Cutting-edge companies are excited to leverage AI to help drive efficiency, boost employee performance, and generate more value from complex data sets. But it can also feel complicated. What value can AI add to an upscale retailer with a busy, frontline workforce that isn’t crunching numbers behind a desk every day?  

We explored how AI can help create value in the retail industry with Buehler’s Fresh Foods, an employee-owned chain focused on feeding its community through groceries and restaurants. Based out of Ohio, Buehler’s Fresh Foods owns and operates 14 grocery stores, 10 restaurants, and eight liquor stores in the United States, all built by four generations of the Buehler family. The company has an HR department of five serving all locations.  

While speaking at Dayforce Discover, Garrett Cox, who oversees HRIS and Talent Management for Buehler’s, shared the organization’s AI vision, including how they’re using AI to improve employee communication across their workforce.   

What obstacles can AI help solve? 

The retail industry has chronically high turnover rates. It can be challenging to retain the right people to keep operations running smoothly and provide an excellent customer experience. As organizations strive to find the right balance of meeting employee expectations within budget, this puts even more pressure on HR leaders.  

“One of the bigger obstacles we run into is the need to support our employees, who are very important to our business,” said Cox. Buehler’s offers competitive benefits for employees, but frontline workers aren’t always aware of all the perks available to them. This can show up in the form of both general and personalized questions, such as providing clear pay and schedule information, benefits providers’ contact information, or clear communication about goals and objectives.  

This isn’t easy with a team of five supporting multiple locations. And Buehler’s needs their HR teams to be working on initiatives that drive performance and support retention. The Buehler’s team started using Dayforce Co-Pilot, an AI-enhanced product that helps serve as a hyper-personalized guide for employees. “We don’t have the staff to reach out to everyone and moving our projects forward has been difficult. Looking at Co-Pilot has helped us alleviate that stress and get the work done we want to get done.”  

What are some benefits you’re seeing? 

This is where Co-Pilot comes in to assist. AI can use an organization’s managed content on Hub to help answer employees’ natural language questions. Instead of the workforce relying on their HR team to answer in a timely manner, Co-Pilot can help summarize and answer key questions in real time.  

In practice, Buehler’s employees are already getting the answers they need. “We’ve seen a decrease in those common questions. We’re seeing less about ‘What is the phone number to our 401K provider?” or ‘How do I find this form?’ We’re seeing more involved questions that are unique to their specific situation. The quality of questions coming in is much more targeted for our team to help.” The power of Co-Pilot assistance can help teams optimize the requests coming in and accelerate the pace in which work gets done.  

Co-Pilot can also create and refine new answers based on your content. Cox shared an anecdote about one of their more nuanced benefits. “One day, an employee came up to me and said he had a conversation with Co-Pilot about [one of our employee benefits]. He said he’d learned more about it in that conversation than he had in all the sessions he’d attended about it. Co-Pilot is great at providing answers in a way that’s easy, digestible, and personalized.”  

When it comes to internal knowledge management, the possibilities with Gen AI are extensive. You can create equal access to information that may have previously been divided into specialized skillsets. As Cox puts it, “You can get creative as you want with Co-Pilot – we have plans to create a specialized HR hub that would only be accessible to the HR team to help us support each other training the AI on HR specific topics.”  

What was the setup and adoption plan? 

Leaders are often excited about opportunities AI can create, but then it comes down to putting it into practice. As with every organization, it’s important to present the right information based on the audience level. Cox detailed how Buehler’s deployed Co-Pilot for their workforce. “We started out with a plan for one hub for hourly employees and one hub with instructions for managers. We started uploading documents in house for each side.”  

Because of how the authorizations are set up in [the Dayforce platform] with audiences, employees won’t get a manager-level answer to a question. It’s cool how Co-Pilot puts the right information in front of the right audiences and restricts the right info.” 

Employees may be unsure about how to use AI in the flow of their real-life jobs. But widespread adoption is essential to help get the full value of the investment. Buehler’s took a two-pronged approach to help their employees get on board. As Cox says, they’re busy frontline workers who are on the floor all day. They don’t necessarily have the time to extensively experiment with AI.  

The first step to adoption is exposure and education. “In house, we created flyers with screenshots of questions we actually get to show them how they can go with their own questions about general HR policies,” said Cox.   

And having a few power users to help in person can make all the difference. “We have Dayforce [technology] experts at the store and talked to them first to make sure they’re trained on how it works. Then when employees have questions, they can talk to someone who’s an advocate of Co-Pilot.” 

Driving efficiency is essential for helping people do the work they’re meant to do. And HR teams are looking to balance employee expectations with the resources they have. Buehler’s is a great example of how mid-size retailers can leverage AI-enhanced technology to better support their people with a more personalized experience at scale.