Ask for exit interview themes, never a summary per leaver

Exit interviews are one of the few honest sources of feedback most organisations have, and the easiest way to waste them is asking an AI tool to "summarise this exit interview" one at a time. Do that and you get a tidy paragraph that's still, underneath, a specific complaint about a specific manager or team - which reads as gossip the moment it's shared past the person who conducted it, and nobody further up the chain can safely act on it without exposing who said what.

Batch several exit interviews together and ask for themes across all of them, not a write-up per leaver. Strip names, teams and dates before you paste anything in, and ask the model to group recurring points - workload, management style, progression, pay - by how often they come up, not by which interview they came from. A theme that shows up in four of the last six leavers is a real signal worth acting on. A single striking quote attributed to one person is a liability dressed up as insight.

The output you actually want is closer to a trend report than a case file: "progression featured in 5 of 8 exits this quarter, most commonly framed as 'no visible next step'" is something a leadership team can genuinely act on. A named account of one person's reasons for leaving generally isn't - it's just harder for anyone to un-know.