Get curious

These words rang in my ears after attending a Rosebank Business Association AI session earlier this year. The host, Justin Flitter helped me to get my head out of the sand. I still think ‘Get curious’ is the best advice to kick off the AI journey for yourself and your employees.

At Upskills we’ve heard a range of responses from our networks from,

‘we don’t think there’s any application for us in our industry’

and

‘we don’t even know where to start’

right through to

‘we’re using it on our health and safety journey and it’s a game changer.’

Seven ideas to start your AI journey

Our advice is, to start with these seven key ideas and bring your employees along.

Communicate about AI and AI literacy. Explain what it is, what it isn’t, and how it learns via large language models. Upskill yourself as you need to so you can communicate effectively about this.
Brainstorm ways AI could help a variety of job roles at your work site. Encourage and facilitate open brainstorming sessions where people consider their tasks and whether AI can help. Potential uses are: analysing data, creating plans or campaigns, creating images or rosters, or summarising key actions from a meeting.
Encourage staff to get curious and explore a range of AI tools. Investigate Perplexity, Claude, Leonardo, Copilot, or tools with built-in AI, like Hubspot and Canva.
Reassure and communicate, again. There is anxiety around automation and job loss. So reskilling and upskilling will mitigate some of the nervousness. We need to prepare people for AI to free up their time so they can take on more interesting mahi.
Upskill and make space for digital confidence. Design a programme specific to your workplace to boost the digital skills, including the AI skills, of all your staff. This will set everyone up to succeed. Train them in prompting AI, which IBM says is one of the most important future skills.
Equip your team with the AI tools they need. Create parameters and guidelines around its safe use.
Create a learning culture around AI use. For a while, everyone quietly chatted away to chatGPT but was not sure if we were allowed to share what we found out! Put a loose structure around this sharing, like a Slack or Messenger channel, or a meeting closer. It is a great way to make it part of business as usual.
Make sure you have an AI usage policy in place. Guide staff to use publicly open generative AI platforms like the free versions of chatGPT and Copilot with caution – by not uploading company information and IP to these spaces. Ideally, bring the AI into your organisation to create a safe boundary.

It seems that AI is well and truly here to stay. So now we need to figure out how to use it, for good, quickly, and inclusively.

Talk to us if you’re keen to get ahead by incorporating AI literacy into a workplace literacy and numeracy programme.