IT Made Easy
AI in the workplace
Are your employees using artificial intelligence (AI) on the job? You might be aware of AI tools being used; you might not be. You might be encouraging the use of AI tools; or you might not. Either way, chances are your employees are using AI in some way to help them be more efficient at work (whether you like it or not). In fact, a recent study found that 68% of people surveyed who used AI at work did not disclose usage to their bosses.
Like most things AI has advantages and risks. For businesses in particular, artificial intelligence and the proliferation of AI tools that have hit the market in recent years throws up risks in addition to all the efficiencies they can drive.
As businesses play catch-up with their employees and the AI market, they can be exposed to various risks and issues. If you haven't already, then a business-led strategy for implementing AI in your workplace should be a priority.
Starting out on your AI journey? Here are our top five steps to help you get AI working for your business (while minimising the risk).
ONE: Decide which AI tool is best for your business
If you wander around your business and ask a few employees about AI tools, what they know and what they use, then you'll no doubt hear Chat GPT mentioned a lot. Chat GPT is a generic AI tool which has both a free and paid version. However, this is just one of many potential AI tools your business could make use of. Starting out on your AI journey, one key decision to make is which AI tool is best for you. To get a handle on this, start by segmenting the AI tools available based on your requirements and their key attributes, such as:
- Is this a public tool that will share your data at a cheaper prices OR
- A private tool that will safeguard your data at a higher price?
- Is this a generic tool that will do a lot of different things cheaply OR
- A specific tool that's targeted towards your specific needs with costs to match?
While you might find, for example, that the free version of ChatGPT (a generic, publicly available tool) might get you results, paying for CoPilot for Microsoft 365 (a private, generic tool) might be worth the cost to safeguard your data. Likewise, although you may be able to wrangle a generic tool into solving your problems, the cost of development and staff resources that it will take could readily be avoided by spending a little bit more on an industry specific tool that's already been developed and will continue to be refined.
TWO: Engage your team early
AI can have a transformative impact on businesses. Implementation of AI within a business can bring about a cultural shift. While some of your team may embrace the technology wholeheartedly, there could be others who find AI and its implementation confronting and difficult.
When Computer Culture works with clients on their AI journey, we recommend an inclusive approach that involves employees from the outset. Buy-in for an implementation journey (rather than just a release and run experience) and a good understanding of what you're aiming to achieve from the outset, can ensure a seamless integration of AI into your daily operations and reduce friction with employees who are slower to embrace it.
"Focus on engaging your co-workers, your colleagues, the workforce, and make them part of the AI transformation. The most successful deployments we've seen are where the end users, and IT and tech resources, work hand in hand to get the technology rolled out."
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business and Industry CoPilot on the WorkLab podcast.
THREE: Figure out your business's approach to AI
Rolling out AI within an organisation shouldn't be a cookie cutter plan. Each business has a different culture, various levels of sophistication and different levels of risk it's willing to manage.
Once you've made the decision to formally roll out AI into your operations you need to ask yourself some key questions:
- How might using AI impact our people?
- How might using AI impact our customers?
- How will our company culture react to having AI integrated into operations?
- As we adopt AI, where do we want to sit on the permissive to restrictive scale?
- How transparent do we want to be internally about the use of AI?
- Are there compliance or legal requirements for us to be transparent about AI usage externally? What about external transparency when we layer a company values lens on this?
These decisions are crucial to creating a clear framework for AI implementation. Answering them needs to be business-led, supported by technical teams or IT resources, and consider the entire business, its people, customers and operations.
Once these questions are answered and you know the direction your business will take with AI, you can develop an AI policy. Once completed, this will be a critical document for the business to communicate your expectations around AI usage by staff.
FOUR: Plan out an AI implementation roadmap
As with implementing any new, transformative tool, having a clear and structured plan will make rolling out AI into your workplace easier. You'll need to map out who will be involved and when, what are the key milestones to achieve across the project and what's the delivery timeline for tasks to be completed by.
A good roadmap should include key elements such as:
- A review of data security and permissions. Using AI increases risks, reviewing data security and permissions before implementing it will help limit the risk of data breaches.
- Staff training. This isn't something that you can just implement and then set free. To get AI humming in your business (and your team embracing it) a training programme is crucial to ensure your team are confident happy users and are using it safely.
- A pilot programme. Depending on the size of your business, rolling AI out to a pilot use group initially can smooth the way for a full roll-out. The benefits of testing with a pilot group are that any learnings about risks, shortcomings, training and ROI can be reviewed and improvements made ahead of a full roll-out.
FIVE: Give it some time (and then review)
No matter how planned out your roll-out is, you'll most likely hit the odd judder bar along the way to embedding AI in your business. Give it some time, support key staff you see as influencers within the business and ensure everyone knows AI is a priority.
After an appropriate level of time (likely different for each business) sit down and review how the roll-out has gone. What's been a success? What isn't working so well? If you have staff who've become super-users, what's working so well for them and what are the benefits they're seeing?
This is a good time to consider key points such as:
- Do we need to roll-out access to more staff?
- Is our initial AI policy fit for purpose or does it need altering?
- Are there other AI tools or applications that we should be assessing and adding into our mix?
Getting started
Ultimately, the question is not going to be whether your business uses AI or not, but rather whether you use it well or not.
Looking to the future, those businesses that adopt AI and really get it working for them will be the ones that excel. If you'd like to be one of those exceling with AI, get in touch to set up a bespoke AI session for your business. We'll help you better understand AI and how it could work for your business, what rolling it out in your business might look like and provide a template for an AI Acceptable Use Policy so you can start moving your journey forward immediately.
