To capitalise on these possibilities, comprehensive training initiatives are key to start the process of building an AI-assisted organisation. Training represents the low hanging fruit and organisations that equip employees with an understanding of how to use AI will increase productivity, reduce costs and create competitive advantage.
Effective use of AI is already transforming knowledge work, both in terms of productivity and quality. A recent study by Harvard Business School with Boston Consulting Group involved 385 consultants who were given tasks within the frontier of artificial intelligence’s current capabilities. Consultants with access to a large language model (GPT-4) completed tasks 25.1% more quickly than those with no AI assistance and the responses produced were more than 40% higher quality compared to a control group.
The AI-assisted era has begun
If you do not already have a strategy to integrate AI into your operations, you need to develop one as soon as possible to enhance products, improve efficiency, and use data-driven insights to outmanoeuvre rivals. We have entered the AI -assisted era and the winners will be those organisations that implement AI effectively, and quickly.
This transition to becoming “AI-assisted” will result in disruption across sectors. Nearly every role must adapt to being augmented with technology as AI redefines how value is created. Training is a first step that any organisation can take and cannot be an afterthought. From ensuing the C-suite understands the basics and its impact on strategy, to frontline implementation, enabling employees through comprehensive training to unlock the potential of AI.
Generally available generative AI chatbots only foreshadow the scale of change coming as commonly used productivity suites from Google and Microsoft launch embedded AI and copilots. Every employee will soon be faced with prompts in almost every application they use. Now id the time to ensure that they can extract the most value from Ai to enhance their productivity and work experience.
In an exponential world those that establish market-leading positions through superior AI utilisation will be difficult to catch. Employees need new skills to collaborate with AI agents. Leadership requires fluency to understand the opportunity and oversee the ethical and effective deployment of AI.
The benefits of AI training
By prioritising employee reskilling and upskilling to augment themselves with AI, organisations can:
- Accelerate AI adoption by ensuring employees use new tools effectively
- Empower workers through AI productivity enhancers
- Instill confidence in AI systems across the organisation
- Enable leadership to provide informed oversight on AI strategy
- Continuously reskill as AI capabilities rapidly advance
Without comprehensive training initiatives, even ambitious AI programmes are likely to falter as rapidly evolving capabilities combined with a lack of understanding results in misalignment and even perceived competition between Ai and employees.
Training leadership to level up and for oversight
To steer companies through AI disruption, boards and executives need foundational training to ensure they understand the context and power of the technology as well as it likely near-term evolution. Training should cover:
- Core AI concepts – large language models, natural language processing, generative AI, multi-modality, near-term evolution of AI, AI Agents
- Organizational readiness factors – data, infrastructure, skill gaps
- AI ethics considerations around transparency, bias, control
- Industry use cases demonstrating AI’s transformative potential
With proper context, leadership will be better equipped to develop AI strategy.
Upskilling all employees
Equipping staff across the enterprise with AI literacy will maximise the organisations benefits from the implementation of AI. Training should cover:
- Relevant AI applications and tools for each employee’s role
- New workflows and processes enhanced by AI automation
- Techniques to collaborate effectively with AI systems
- Domain excellence – using AI creatively in areas like design
Employees can now leverage new skills such as the ability to turn visual ideas into images. Ongoing AI training programmes will also be attractive to new recruits when comparing roles with AI-assisted organisations and those that are behind the technological curve.
Create competitive advantage with AI training
The companies that recognise that the development of complementary human capabilities to unlocks the potential of AI will pull ahead. Similar to digital transformation in the past, businesses failing to align skills risk decline. However, the speed of change as a result of the evolution of AI will be faster.
The AI-assisted era has arrived and the first steps to building an AI-assisted organisation are training and the implementation of policy and governance.
Visit Implement AI to learn more about readying your organisation with tried and tested training courses covering everything ranging from AI fundamentals, to prompt engineering, to content, sales and marketing.
Listen to our weekly podcast: ‘The AI-assisted Organisation’.
AI Training courses: https://www.implementai.io/training
