By Jared Cohen, COO
We’ve been hearing from clients that they want to get everyone at their companies using AI more, but they’re struggling with gaining adoption. So, we decided to share some high-level lessons from those conversations.
As we’ve talked about, at NU, we take an aggressively tech-powered approach to providing executive search services. As we’ve also discussed, with AI, a focus on internal tools will change from a material but not vital feature to a business-altering competitive advantage. Instead of saving days and weeks, AI has the potential to save months and years. Even more important, in addition to saving time, AI will perform many tasks better than humans could.
The use cases for AI are countless and growing, so finding use cases is actually easy (ask AI if you need ideas!). The hard part is executing to make AI adoption happen at your company.
Here are five tips on how to get everyone at your company using AI:
1. Create the Culture
Create a culture of looking to AI first to solve problems. Add it to your company values. Have leadership talk about it. The mindset and approach to solving every problem should be: How can I use AI to do this task better and more efficiently?
2. Implement the Triggers
So, most of us should already have been investing more in packaged software and custom internal tools like those even before AI.
For an action to happen, it helps to have a trigger that reminds people to do it. Having an AI-first culture will help, but adding triggers into your Operating System will be important. Do full meetings where everyone shares their AI use cases and lessons. Add an agenda item to standing meetings where people demo AI use cases. Create a chat room where people talk AI, share ideas, and log use cases. Add using AI to your project checklists. Triggers like those will make it difficult not to use AI.
3. Train and Support
This one is pretty obvious, but people won’t be able to incorporate AI into their jobs if they don’t have the tools, training, and support to do so. Provide the tools and training when you launch the AI initiative. Then make sure that the team has ongoing support from AI experts to help implement as needed. People don’t need to know how to do everything themselves. But they should be able to do many tasks on their own. And they should know how to spot more advanced opportunities to use AI, even if they don’t know how to implement it, and who to go to for help.
4. Add the Incentives
For an action to happen, it also helps to have incentives. Prioritize AI by building incentives to use it into your company goal setting process. Measure people’s performance in part based on their adoption of AI. Have AI be contributing factors to achieving other goals by finding efficiencies. Some examples:
- Use AI to reduce the time it takes to do a task by 10% in Q3.
- Use AI to reduce the time it takes to write a blog post by 20% in Q2.
- Use AI to source 20 sales leads in Q4.
Celebrate those successes to recognize the people who achieve the goals.
5. Assign Ownership
In addition to having company-wide incentives, assign ownership of AI adoption to one person. No matter the project, having one person own it makes it much more likely to get done!
Those five tips should help you get everyone at your company using AI.
Reach out if you’re looking to hire for AI-related roles, if you’d like to talk more about how to launch an AI initiative at your company, or if you need help facilitating an AI training session!
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