How To Get More People Adopting AI at Work To Build Modern Skills

Is there anyone left on this planet who is not talking about Gen AI?

If there is, I’d love to have a conversation with them as I’m sure they’ll actually have something interesting to talk about from the usual discourse. Make no mistake, AI is interesting and a huge part of the present and future, but the bubble will burst.

Or it’ll just get bigger and The Matrix will happen in the next few years.

Saying all that…

Guess what we’re talking about today. Yes. Gen AI in the workplace.

What a hypocrite – forgive me! 🙏

I’m walking with you back in AI land because we (once again) are needed to unlock the mass adoption of AI at work. You read that right. 

Your company needs L&D to make this successful.

1. AI shapes tasks and jobs.
2. BCG’s report highlights the confidence and access gap in AI adoption
3. Focus on education, practical use cases, and equal learning opportunities for successful AI adoption at work
4. The 4-step plan helps build confidence, curiosity, and skills to bridge the AI adoption gap
5. AI usage yields time savings, increased speed, improved work quality, and more strategic work

Here’s what we know:

• Gen AI is era-defining tech just like the internet
• It’s reshaping how we do tasks and thus, how we build jobs
• Gen AI skills are a huge black hole for every company on earth

Yet, despite all the excitement. Not as many people are using AI powered tools as you think.

Why?

A new report from BCG sheds light on this.

Newsflash: People can’t use new stuff if you don’t show them.

We’re not in the business of magic.

As I see it, we have two problems to fix for mass adoption of AI tools at work:

• Improved education on the topic and practical use cases based on individual context
• Closing the gap between senior leaders and frontline employees access to knowledge

If we don’t do this then companies will literally be wasting millions, even billions, of dollars on the new wave of AI powered workplace tools.

Yes, my friend, it’s time for you to be the hero of this story.

Insights that matter from the BCG AI at Work Report

Ok. Let’s drop some knowledge to set the scene.

Those smart folks at BCG spoke with over 13,000 humans to find out what’s going on with AI at work today. As always, it’s packed full of stuff but these are the insights I want to focus on in our chat.

The adoption and confidence gap:

Turns out that the majority of us at the frontline where stuff gets done are not only less confident then our managers and leaders, we have less access to keep informed on new tools.

• Frontline employees: 33%
• Managers: 41%
• Leaders: 50%.

This becomes the 6th report I’ve seen findings like this.

I see it in my work with companies too. I shared more on this with a video on LinkedIn. We’ll get into strategies to fix this later.

The HUGE knowledge and skills disparity

Are you really surprised?

You probably shouldn’t be.

From what BCG tells us (much like this report from Asana). Those doing the work aren’t getting equal learning opportunities to craft skills with Gen AI. Leaders and managers are ahead of the humble frontline employee.

I find this odd as I believe those who spend most of the time doing the ‘actual work’ can benefit immensely from the new wave of AI tools.

The ‘expect people to figure it out strategy’ never works

It’s not lost on me that I’m preaching to the choir here.

It’s rare that people just get it. That’s where we (as in L&D and advocates of learning) come into play. Our role is not about skill building alone. We build confidence too. Confidence (and no BS knowledge) is exactly what the AI at work scene is missing.

Confidence builds curiosity, which leads to motivation which leads to learning.

From the BCG report, this is what we know:

• People don’t feel they have time to learn about AI (I was laughing so hard while writing that line)
• They aren’t sure how and when to use the tools that are available
• There’s a level of distrust with tools

4 steps to build Confidence, Curiosity and Skills to close the AI adoption gap

This is not going to be one of those useless lists.

Telling you to invest in continuous learning and be human centered is not going to help you. So, we’re going to get deep and tactical.

1/ Create an AI skills framework

To start, let me show you how I build a skills level framework for Gen AI. I use this with my clients to help them understand the meaningful learning experiences for each stage of maturity. Hopefully, it’s pretty self explanatory.

The goal is building confidence through meaningful knowledge and practical skills.

Skulls represent skill levels. You can deploy levels as singular projects, team-ups or a whole scaling journey. It all depends on workforce maturity and the context of the business.

2/ Discover where you are and where you want to be

To help me uncover the best fit for a business, I use three tools:

1. My AI skills readiness framework
2. The Asana AI maturity model (download avail below)
3. Discovery sessions

These are all free for you to use.

You’ll find detailed ‘how-to’ guides for each at the links provided above. These will help you understand the lay of the land today. With this information, you can make a recommendation on the best experience to deploy.

My experience as of writing this is that 99% are at the ‘New to AI’ stage.

That’s not a bad thing. It will enable you to put strong foundations in place by teaching the fundamentals and not jumping into whatever the current hot tool is.

→ Too many companies make that mistake.

3/ Create your strategy

You don’t need to overcomplicate this.

We’re not looking for perfection. Instead, you want a useful plan on a page to steer your AI ship.

Get some ideas on this in my detailed “How to build your AI learning strategy” guide.

Here’s a series of AI explainer videos from my YouTube channel you can use:

• How Generative AI Works: Everything you need to know about AI (7 part video series)
  
• How to work intelligently with Gen AI tools (11 part video series)

4/ Connect, share and learn

For true success, you need think outside the norm of L&D experiences.

Gen AI moves so damn fast that what we held as gold yesterday is worthless today. I get that can be scary. Its also an opportunity to encourage people to come together to cut through the noise.

My biggest recommendation is to build an internal community around this topic.

I don’t mean a company mandated one. No one wants to be part of that!

I’m positive you’ll find lots of curious and dubious humans who want to explore the Gen AI landscape.

Leverage tools like:

• Your company collaboration platform e.g Slack and Teams
• Encourage no-code with AI hackathons (you don’t need to be an engineer for this)
• Company emails and newsletters
• On-demand Gen AI toolkits with prompt templates and how-to videos.

What’s the ROI?

It’s easy for me to tell you to ‘do this’.

But it’s pointless unless it provides ROI for your work and business. The true monetary gains of Gen AI have yet to be realised. What we can see is the individual and team level benefits ↓

10,000 employees told BCG that using Gen AI has:

• Saved them time (84%)
• Increase speed to deliver (83%)
• Improved work quality (81%)
• Created time for more strategic work/human stuff (81%)
• Decreased time spent on admin (80%)

While this is impressive, I’m curious to learn what these people did with the time they got back.

Luckily, BCG covered that one ↓

 note they forgot to add ‘drink more tea’. I’ll let them off with that this time.

Get inspired: Case studies to erh…study

Everyone loves a good old case study, don’t they?

In case you missed it, I covered how 3 companies introduced AI tools to their teams. Specifically focusing on the problems they we’re trying to solve, how they deployed tools and tactics you can use too.

Final Thoughts

• Workforces won’t use new tools intelligently unless you show them
• Building confidence and dispelling fears enables people to build useful future skills
• Understanding the Matrix is pretty cool

Resources

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.