Over the past year, I've been doing A LOT of AI workshops. Because of my background and ability to speak/translate for both technical and non-technical audiences, these workshops have been to lots of different audiences. Sometimes, they're for engineering departments, a group you think would be WAY ahead of the curve here. And it's true, some people are, and most people have done some experimenting, but many people still are in experimenting mode or just trying desperately to follow along with the more advanced adopters to update their workflows. Sometimes, these workshops are for nonprofit teams who know they should be using AI but don't have the budget to experiment with any tool they feel like, are generally more intimidated by tech, and are just trying to figure out the best tools and ways to use them without losing a lot of time to experiments that don't yield results.
What I've found, overall, is that almost every team has the following breakdown:
- 10-20% of people who are "AI-pilled", or, in other words, heavy adopters, usually experimenting in their free time, often with their own money, and are all-in on what AI can do.
- 10% of people who are very opposed to using AI. They're concerned about the societal implications, think it's unnecessary, and have often tried AI tools a few times but got garbage results and decided spending more time wasn't warranted for their role.
- and then you have this huge chunk... 70-80% of people who are interested (or even fascinated), excited, and see the potential of using AI tools more in their day-to-day work but they're just not sure where to start, feel overwhelmed, are unsure if they should spend the time with everything continuing to change so quickly, and need education and time to unlock what's possible.
And I've been lucky enough to see this both as an external workshop designer and facilitator, as well as internally as a fractional executive.
When getting started, I've found that people get stuck on a few things:
- They think they have to start using AI for the tasks that they love doing the most. Looking at the core of their job, they think the thing that's key in their title is what they have to use AI for.
- They see everyone else (usually not WITHIN their company but on the internet) doing incredibly complicated things and they either want to do that first or they get overwhelmed with the idea of breaking those complex actions into smaller steps in order to get started on that path.
- They feel like using AI is lazy, cheating, or diminishing their worth as an employee.
I won't get into #3 here... I think this previous post covers that pretty well. But let's look at the other two.
For #1 I want to reiterate that you DON'T have to use AI for the parts of your job that you love (you may in the future, or you may want to in the future). When you're first starting out, I suggest starting with three things. First, use an AI tool for anything that you're googling. Going to AI as your search engine and understanding the differences there (even with google bringing in AI search results at the top of your results output) is really powerful in just helping you understand how AI works, outputs information, and allows you to interact with the results differently. It's also a helpful way to explore different tools (i.e. gemini vs. claude vs. chatgpt vs. copilot). Second, use AI for anything that you hate doing. Sure, we all hopefully enjoy most of the parts of our job, but we always find ourselves doing something we dislike or asking ourselves why on earth we have to spend time doing whatever that silly task is. And if you can't find anything from your work-life that checks this box, you almost certainly have personal use cases here (especially if you're a parent). Third, use AI for anything that you find yourself stuck in analysis paralysis mode on. AI is great at providing comparisons and helping to make reasoned recommendations based on your specific desires and needs.
For #2... this one actually drives me crazy but it also makes sense. It feeds so deeply into our human psychology. We devalue ourselves and our ability when it feels like everyone else is so far beyond where we are. And we often get overwhelmed or think we can't do something when many of these tutorials have so many steps that move so quickly and to go through it slowly feels like it would take forever and who has the time for that sort of endeavor?! Additionally, there's so much guidance online that you could spend forever consuming information about what to do, how to prompt perfectly, and more without ever just diving in and getting your hands dirty. The reality is that the best thing to do is to just start. Start with the three suggestions above, and then take mini-steps forward. You don't have to do ALL THE THINGS (and actually if you dig deeper into all the things, you'll discover many of them require paying for tools or tiers you're probably not ready for, take a significant amount of time to develop, or are mostly hype as opposed to reliable and sustainable tools in the way that they're marketed). The other thing I'll add is that you can stew over all this guidance, but sometimes you can follow the guidance to the letter in a way that holds you back from actually using the tool or making the tool low-effort to use. I was recently in a conversation with a few people about prompting and they were trying to follow the specific guidance that when you prompt make sure to give the role, goal, constraints, and context, and they were struggling to craft a prompt. But then I proposed: what if you ignored all that guidance and was just prompting through using your voice or typing in what you need, imagining you were telling a less experienced colleague what you needed, what would you say? And honestly, when they said it, it covered all of those needs: I'm trying to X as a person in Y role, here are some of the things I've thought about that we can't do, and here's some extra information you need to know in order to write this up or make good suggestions. It covers the same criteria but instead of feeling like a robotic formula, it's just you talking at the level you operate on, because as a person in a leadership role, you already know to cover those pieces of information when delegating or asking for something from someone who's less experienced and doesn't have your context.
This is just a small portion of what I talk about with groups (sometimes as guidance and sometimes as more of a discussion) that really helps them take a deep breath and free themselves from some of the expectations and pressure we're all feeling in our AI adoption journeys right now, regardless of where you are.
If this sounds interesting to you, and exactly like what your team needs, make sure to reach out ASAP to discuss and check out my AI Offerings. I'll help you talk through what actions will lead to the outcomes you're looking for.
