Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I saw a headline on CNBC recently saying that “Google execs say employees have to ‘be more AI-savvy’ as competition ramps up”. I agree that there’s a lot of competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) space. And I agree that employees at every level of the organization need to learn more about AI. The question becomes what’s the best way to help employees become “AI-savvy”? It starts with learning.
Remember that with anything new, employees will have to unlearn certain things and relearn something else. Artificial intelligence is no exception. This learning curve will take time. It also means being intentional in the order that employees should learn. Artificial intelligence is growing and changing rapidly. As such, organizations – and employees – will want to find ways to stay in learner mode.
I attended an artificial intelligence conference earlier this year hosted by the University of Florida. One of the speakers compared artificial intelligence learning to a construction scaffold. Organizations should build a foundation and then make plans to add to it. If you don’t like the scaffold analogy, think of it like building your favorite burger. You want to layer the ingredients in a way that it doesn’t fall apart with the first bite.
So, as your organization is planning to increase their use of AI, here are some activities that can help employees learn and get more comfortable using AI.
One of the first places to start is making sure employees know how to learn prompts, meaning how to ask AI a question. Think of this like learning how to conduct a search on the internet. At one time, Boolean search was a good skill to have. It took practice to learn the right search sequence. The same could be said for AI. (Side note: I’m not here to debate the relevance of Boolean search. There is some conversation on the internet that it’s not as necessary as it used to be. And that search engines don’t recognize it the way they used to.)
Next, AI is not a substitute for subject matter expertise. It’s possible that AI might not be aware of certain aspects of history or breaking news. But AI tools could be perfect for summarizing information. Maybe we can give ai a bunch of articles and ask it to summarize the information. I’ve worked with plenty of people that if you gave them a handful of pages on a topic, they would never read them. But a one-page summary? Yes, they would. This could be very handy going into operational planning and budget season.
Managers play a big role in employee learning. Organizations should include AI in the organization’s leadership and management development programs. Do managers know how to use AI? Do they know how to encourage and support the use of AI in their teams? This can’t become one of those ‘do as I say not as I do’ moments. Managers should learn how to use Ai so they can share with employees their experience.
If organizations want employees to be more “AI-savvy” then they need to 1) teach employees how to use the right prompts, 2) use AI for small activities like summarizing information, and 3) ensure that managers are supporting the use of AI tools. This is the foundation for building future AI-related learning activities.
Let me wrap up today’s article with a funny little story about AI learning. Regular readers of HR Bartender know I play Pokémon Go. Well, one of the online Pokémon groups that I belong to started this cute thread with people posting a realistic version of their avatar with their favorite Pokémon buddy. So, I decided I wanted to see what mine would look like. But I didn’t really know how to ask the question. I asked AI to tell me how to ask them to create this image. And they did. Yep, that’s where we are. AI told me how to ask AI.
I’m not sharing this story so you can ask AI to make cute Pokémon images. But it does speak to how fast AI is developing and the need to learn more about it. Keep doing AI experiments and learning.
Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby while exploring the streets of Atlanta, GA
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