Trends, January 2025

Is your company ready to adopt artificial intelligence? Recently, organizations worldwide have been considering the impact AI can have on their workplaces. Some companies have gone so far as to formally adopt AI tools, while others are slowly taking steps toward doing so. Before organizations integrate AI, review the following recommendations.

For teams considering how to adopt artificial intelligence, consider these three lessons that other teams have learned.

Lesson #1: Start with widely available data. Data privacy concerns often halt AI projects before they begin. To bypass that hurdle, use data that is already accessible to all employees when experimenting with AI. Example information includes your company health plan details and standard operating procedures.

Lesson #2: Foster a culture of experimentation. Resistance to AI often stems from a fear of the unknown or making mistakes. To mitigate that, provide explicit permission to experiment, and let people know it's an expectation that many experiments will fail.

Lesson #3: Prioritize personal impact over ROI. While it's tempting to focus on the return on investment, the initial goal should be to make a meaningful impact on your team's daily tasks. Encourage team members to apply AI to alleviate their most pressing pain points. That personal impact boosts adoption rates and uncovers areas where AI can deliver significant value, eventually leading to substantial ROI.

Those three lessons equip your team to navigate the AI change management process effectively, unlocking new opportunities for growth and innovation within your team.

https://strategy.ai

As artificial intelligence becomes more accessible and integral to the global workforce, organizations must navigate the opportunities it provides and the challenges it poses. Organizational readiness is key for organizations focused on integrating AI into their ways of working. Two crucial components for ensuring employees feel prepared to adopt AI are: the organization's integration of AI technologies into the resources available to employees; and the training it provides employees to learn to use AI and apply it to their unique workstreams. To research the effect targeted training has on an organization's ability to prepare its people to integrate AI, consulting firm TiER1 Performance designed a monthlong gamified training program to build comfort, familiarity, and competence with generative AI (GAI) tools.

Sixty percent of TiER1 employees completed the training program hosted on Adoptify, TiER1's web-based platform that supports learning and adoption through gamified experiences while measuring readiness. Participants completed a baseline survey before the training program to assess self-reported confidence, familiarity, and usage of AI technologies. That provided insight into participants' initial attitudes toward, confidence with, and usage of AI, setting a reference point for evaluating program impact.

The training program fostered hands-on experience with GAI tools in a low-risk, exploratory environment, enabling participants to learn by doing through structured challenges that incorporated gamification elements such as rewards and progression markers. Participants could also acknowledge colleagues for encouraging, modeling, and helping them adopt GAI by sending them a special note on the platform.

To earn points, participants engaged in weekly exercises with ChatGPT that involved real-world applications of AI, including to:

• Create and customize meal plans and travel itineraries.

• Brainstorm and refine ideas applicable to their professional projects.

• Compare ChatGPT responses with Google search results to evaluate AI's unique capabilities.

• Develop and interview personas for simulated scenarios to understand AI's conversational strengths.

• Analyze data in an Excel spreadsheet.

• Summarize meeting transcripts.

Those exercises not only demonstrated GAI's versatility, but they also prompted participants to reflect on how they can apply AI tools to their specific roles and work environments. Intellectual property considerations included at the beginning of the training program provided context for responsible and ethical AI usage.

After completing the program, participants assessed changes in their confidence, familiarity, and usage patterns with AI, and the results showed notable improvements in each area. Regarding confidence, 52 percent of participants reported feeling "confident" using AI after completing the program, whereas before the program, only 38 percent of participants reported feeling "confident." Moreover, the number of participants describing themselves as "very familiar" with AI nearly doubled from 23 percent to 41 percent, and participants reported using AI more frequently and for more diverse purposes.

Those findings highlight the efficacy of targeted training in preparing organizations for AI adoption and integration. By providing employees with structured, gamified learning opportunities to experiment with GAI in a safe environment, organizations can equip them for practical, impactful implementation of these transformative tools and facilitate a smoother transition to AI-enabled workflows.

tier1performance.com/adoptify