Founder of 11:11 Partners, a firm that helps create leadership teams at the intersection of their skill set and passion.
A March estimate by Goldman Sachs predicted that 300 million jobs could be replaced by generative artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, IBM has announced plans to stop hiring people for jobs it thinks AI can do. The Washington Post reported on professionals whose jobs were replaced by AI and became air conditioning technicians and dog walkers as a result.
As the CEO of a company, I’m supporting my employees as they learn to master the technology themselves. Investing in your employees’ mastery of AI allows them to thrive in this time of uncertainty, spend their days increasing their productivity and increase their confidence in their ability to cooperate with AI, not compete.
Leaders of companies need to help workers shift from a threat mindset to an opportunity mindset if they want their company to end up on top. After all, when every company has access to the same set of AI tools, it is still the employees that will continue to make the difference.
Some employees might be curious—and scared.
When one of my employees expressed interest in learning about AI several months ago, I knew it was just the start of what could be a revolution for our company’s workflow.
I encouraged her to take a look, during work hours, at the technology and services available in order to see how they could help her with parts of her job. We allowed her to self-enroll in courses about AI and prompt engineering, and in those courses, she developed key insights as to how AI could optimize our workflow. Our conversations ultimately helped shape our company’s philosophy regarding the usage of AI.
AI is here to help our workforce do fewer things they don’t enjoy. Now, we spend less time on the clerical work associated with building job profiles and spend more time (and get more energy from) finding jobs for people. Indeed, less time spent on office tasks permits a greater investment in our time in the creative aspects of our jobs.
Since our employee took her first steps into this brave new world, we’ve had every department go through and look at what part of their jobs could be done more efficiently. We didn’t replace anyone with AI; we cultivated higher productivity. We’ve now made a course on effective AI prompt engineering part of the learning and development for new hires.
By empowering our employees to master AI, the fear and trepidation surrounding this massive societal shift were replaced with confidence and competence.
While every company will respond differently to AI, here are two concrete things you can do to help your staff thrive in the emerging age of AI.
Provide a framework for how AI will be used in your company.
Establishing a strategy for AI will be just as pivotal for a company as having a strategy for marketing or growth. Establishing an internal and external strategy early on is essential for not only reassuring your employees of the role of AI in company operations but also can help stakeholders and investors know how you stand apart from your competitors.
When thinking about internal uses for AI, consider if there are certain functions that will be off-limits to AI—things that will always be done solely by human hands. For other functions in which you might be integrating AI, consider to what extent there will be human oversight. When it comes to important issues such as privacy and protecting customer data, there are just some things AI might not be suitable for.
The determination of how heavily you can integrate AI into your company’s operations and how much you can “trust” also depends on which AI service you use.
Externally, think about how your competitors are using AI and how you can do things differently and in a better way. Establish how your company uses AI on your website to inform prospective customers and clients. While hiring a chief AI officer seems to be a lofty goal for many companies, understand that growth in AI usage will be exponential.
Give employees flexibility and support in learning to use AI.
On the note of establishing an AI strategy, while leaders will be charged with deciding the overall direction of their company’s AI strategy, I think it is critical to also let employees explore how to best integrate AI into their jobs. They know the minutiae of their jobs best and can, therefore, most effectively help write the new job handbook.,
Let your employees learn to use AI, whether that be YouTube videos from skilled content creators or formal coursework from a reputable company. While some might shirk away from letting employees use company time for this, understand that this is an investment in their personal growth and productivity. It will pay off.
Check in with your employees and see what AI providers they prefer in addition to what ideas they have to improve their individual jobs and the company as a whole. Think about how your company’s baseline training can be expanded to make sure new hires can hit the ground running at a high level of AI competency.
Having an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to embracing AI as an organization is vital to ensuring your company thrives in the coming years without pitting AI against your employees. Let your employees be part of the solution rather than having the solution given to them. Charting a path forward through these uncertain times is something that is a company-wide effort, and the best results require the institutional, role-specific knowledge that each employee brings to the table.
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