I was barreling toward a line of trees on my new 250cc dirt bike, and I couldn’t remember how to stop it. This was the first dirt bike ride of my life, and I instinctively tried to squeeze the handbrake, instead I twisted the throttle inwards, which caused the bike to go even faster. A tree branch at the edge of the woods caught me in the chest and lifted me off into the air. I watched the bike continue on its own for about 15 feet before it fell over and I crashed to the ground.
To many of us, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is like me on that 250cc dirt bike. We’re excited about the power, but we don’t want a face full of dirt and pine needles. You can avoid the the crash by creating an AI adoption strategy. To fully adopt AI, you’ll need to go through a series of steps. These steps build upon each other, each delivering value on its own, each holding potential that will be further unlocked at the next step.
The first step is to start at a personal level. The most available and safest AI tool for businesses is Microsoft Copilot. It’s already accessible to you in Microsoft 365. Encourage your team to start experimenting with it. There are a series of personal tasks you can immediately elevate using Copilot. Instead of searching with Google, first ask Copilot the same question. You’ll be surprised how often you are looking for a simple answer rather than a website. Then, take your next email and ask Copilot something like this: “I’m trying to communicate [x]. Evaluate this email and provide suggestions on how I could be clearer.” There are hundreds of other such use cases. You can even ask Copilot to suggest more based on your daily activities.
As you and your team begin to use AI on a personal level, you’ll build a competency around how to produce results with it. You’ll also begin to hit the limits of AI, which will cause it to feel much less magical and more like what it really is, a new kind of productivity tool. The entire team will begin to see productivity increases just by using AI individually. To speed up this process, you may consider hiring an outside party to provide AI training to your team.
Once you’ve gained some fluency at an individual level, you need to build a game plan around safety. The term “AI Safety” invokes images of fighting hordes of angry robots with red eyes. Actually, it’s more like establishing an employee handbook. Just as we set out a list of guidelines for our employees that will help them uphold the standards of our organization, we need to do this with the AI processes we put in place. In particular, you should give direction around a few key areas. Take these three steps with your team:
- Specify what kind of data is allowed to be fed into AI tools.
- Outline how you will validate the outputs from AI for accuracy.
- Address some ethical considerations, such as making sure that you never build AI that deceives your customer.
Once you have a foothold of individual employees using AI and you’ve put some safety guidelines in place, you are ready to ascend to the next level. Now you can build AI into the core operations of your business. Most businesses I have worked with can find some kind of major productivity increase available inside of their processes which modern AI tools can unlock. Imagine that you could assemble the draft of a project plan with the click of a button, or that each employee received a daily email that outlined their top priorities for the day along with an update on overall project progress. For each business the opportunities are unique. When your entire team learns to evaluate every process in light of available AI tools, you gain a competitive edge which goes beyond saving time. You begin to free your top performers to focus on producing more of the value that allows your business to grow.
By the end of last year, only a fraction of businesses in America had begun to use AI in their core processes. Now is the time to jump ahead of them, but you’ll need a strategy to do it successfully.
About the author:
Sam Schneider helps businesses add AI into their core processes through his consulting company Navispect. He also runs a YouTube channel called MakeTheJump where he teaches how to automate business tasks with AI.
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