How Companies are Using AI as a New Team Member
Most organizations treat the implementation of AI as a technical challenge. What's often overlooked is the opportunity to use AI as a new team member. With AI expanding across enterprises, leaders must tap the full potential of AI as both a productivity tool and a thought partner.
University of Phoenix research conducted among 604 HR leaders and workers and supplemented with interviews of senior HR leaders found that workers want to partner with AI as a new team member, not just learn the technical skills to use AI in their job. Nearly 4 out of 10 workers want to learn how to collaborate with AI in their job, and this ranked slightly behind learning how to use AI to get their job done faster and with greater efficiency.
AI Is Your New Team Member
The marks a shift in extending the application of AI beyond technical domains to help workers integrate AI in their team.
Understanding the Human Side of AI
Exploring the human potential of embedding AI into one's job will be the next frontier for leaders. For example, while EY has made a significant investment in training 400,000 of its workforce to understand the fundamentals of safely using AI, it is not stopping there. The firm is now focusing on the human side of AI. Alex Laurs, Chief Learning and Development Officer of EY, believes there is also an opportunity to balance the investment in AI foundations with training in human centric skills. He notes that an important point often missed in the narrative on adopting AI is that uniquely human skills will themselves be augmented with AI. Laurs explains, 'At EY, people aren't just learning to use AI to be more efficient - they are learning to use AI to be better human beings and more impactful leaders. For example, in the EY Master Classes (a program design to grow these human skills) professionals can now learn how to augment their leadership skills using AI as a partner to become better critical thinkers and to identify actions they can take to make their colleagues feel more respected and valued.'
Working with AI is the New Workplace Competency
There is an increased expectation that current and prospective hires should integrate AI in their jobs. This is impacting hiring decisions with 87% of leaders who plan to hire listing AI experience as valuable for job seekers.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn communicated to his workers that AI usage will be factored into the company's hiring decisions and performance reviews. In addition, before requesting a new hire, teams will have to demonstrate why AI can not do a job. And in a viral manifesto to Shopify's workforce, CEO Tobias Lütke emphasized that AI proficiency is required for all employees from junior levels to the executive team. How well they integrate AI use into their jobs will influence how Shopify assesses and rewards them. And Cisco is also asking managers to consider how jobs could potentially be done by AI before filling any open roles on their team. All three examples point to the need for workers to be students of AI, to think about how AI will change their job role, and to be creative in proposing new ways to use AI for both efficiency gains and innovation.
What Leaders Can Do to Help Workers Tap the Full Potential of AI
To develop an AI-powered workforce, leaders must create transparency in how they use AI, consider embedding AI into training programs and use AI to train workers in human skills not just AI foundations.
#1. Develop a culture of shared AI knowledge
Being a constant learner of AI is now expected for all workers and leaders need to role model this by building a culture of curiosity where leaders use AI in their work and then share this, rather than just mandate AI usage.
Alex Laurs of EY has done just that. Laurs created a strategy and innovation AI agent to assist his team in developing a new learning and development operating model. He shared this with his learning team and challenged them to use it, break it, report back on the flaws, and create the next iteration. Laurs shares, 'the successful adoption of AI will require all of us to disrupt our workflows and create new processes.' Laurs is already disrupting his own job by scheduling weekly one-on-one meetings with his strategy and innovation AI agent to provide continuing context for projects and then review performance. This expanded use of AI as a collaborator disrupts the job of leaders but also leads to enhancing their creativity and innovation.
#2. Use AI to develop human skills
In a workplace where AI is used in one's daily job, training and development must be re-imagined to incorporate AI tools. For example, Medtronic, a global healthcare technology company, is deploying AI/virtual reality (VR) role playing to train sales teams in product training as well as how to navigate ambiguity, exercise judgment in complex sales situations, and resolve conflicts with customers.
Matt Walter, Chief Human Resources Officer at Medtronic, shared, "We launched a pilot using AI/virtual reality role-playing simulations for sales teams in January 2025, and we are already seeing a 94% increase in confidence levels among the salesforce, and and we saw an 82% improvement in retention of knowledge after training with AI/VR compared to 77% for traditional training and usage also led to increases in efficiency in getting sales representatives into the field faster.' Walter, who is trained as an industrial psychologist, continues, 'we believe using immersive technologies like AI/VR role playing simulates realistic workplace scenarios helping our sales representatives to both develop the skills they need to sell as well as receive real time feedback in their jobs.' Medtronic is incorporating AI/VR into their onboarding process for new sales hires, allowing them to become familiar with AI early in their careers and learn how to leverage AI in their jobs. The goal at Medtronic is to shift from training workers about AI to embedding AI into training.
3. Balance your investment in both AI and human literacy
Organizations must balance their investment in AI proficiency with an investment in the human skills needed to partner with AI. While AI adoption has increased for knowledge workers, many are not tapping into the full potential to use AI as a team member. Recent research from Gallup reports that while adoption has increased by 12% from 2024 to 2025, workers are still not prepared to work with AI in their jobs.
What's missing is training on how to integrate AI as a new team member.
Udacity is taking the lead here with the launch of Agentic AI Fluency course, an online training program targeting non-technical workers who learn how to adapt workflows with AI and understand the power of collaborating with AI agents to enhance both productivity and creativity.
In addition to being AI fluent, workers need to understand how to collaborate with AI and decide which tasks suit AI versus humans, while questioning AI's assumptions, assessing the accuracy of AI solutions, and spotting potential biases.
Leadership As the Practice of Role Modeling AI Experimentation
The reality of working side by side with AI is here. Deloitte predicts that by 2027, 50% of organizations will deploy generative AI where humans work alongside AI agents.
Leaders must go beyond setting mandates for being an AI first organization to role modeling an AI mindset for their teams. This starts with being vulnerable and willing to experiment with AI, as Alex Laurs did in creating an AI agent to assist in a strategic initiative at EY, and as Matt Walter did with embedding AI in a training program to create a more personalized learning experience for sales representatives.
For a growing number of companies, the message to workers is clear: be a student of AI, use AI to improve the quality of your work, and learn how to incorporate AI as a team member.
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