Someone in Your Company Has Already Figured This Out

In nearly every company I visit there are two or three people who have quietly worked out how to make AI genuinely useful. They are rarely the people you would guess.

At one firm that encourages everyone to use AI, a handful of staff are remarkably productive with it while most of the company has barely started. At another, with roughly 200 employees, you could count the number of people using AI on one hand.

I consistently hear two things about the employees with the initiative to adopt AI. They are usually not in IT, and nobody has ever asked them how they do it.

These early adopters are motivated. Someone spent their own evenings working out which tasks these tools handle well, where they fail, and how to ask for what they actually need. That knowledge is specific to your business, and at the moment it lives in one person’s head.

Find those people and spend some time with them to learn how they use AI. Focus on reviewing real examples from the company’s own work. Have them show you how they use AI every week, including the parts where it does not work well, which is often valuable because there is potential for impact but it needs some work for the change to materialize.

One caution. Ask which AI they are using before you celebrate it, because the most productive person on a personal account without proper security controls also creates a large amount of risk to your company. (Click here for information on the difference between personal and company accounts.)

Name the three people in your company who are best with these tools. If you cannot, just begin asking some of your managers who in the business is using AI. People tend to know who the power users are and chances are good they’ll emerge soon enough.