People Powered By AI: The Future Of Your Workforce
It's official: AI has gone mainstream. And the numbers prove it: 71% of organizations regularly use gen AI (up from just 33% in 2023), making the adoption of this technology among the fastest in the history of mankind.
As someone in the business of people, I often get asked where a company like mine, one that provides growing companies with virtual assistants, belongs in an era dominated by AI. The answer is, AI enhances what we do, but it doesn't replace the value of real human relationships.
If you see AI as a tool rather than a threat, it can unlock countless opportunities to bring more humanity to your workforce—one that increasingly operates through digital screens.
Bridging The AI Adoption Gap
Like most tech revolutions before it, the use of AI started as a grassroots effort—and has been adopted by more employees than many leaders realize. It's a bottom-up pattern of adoption that has CEOs around the world increasing investments in AI, but there's a delta in what they're contributing and what they're getting credit for.
Turns out, 40% of employees think their IT department is behind AI implementation. While being a glory hog is unbecoming, business leaders need to communicate their AI plans, processes and goals to increase trust—in their leadership and plans—and ensure adoption at scale within their organization.
When AI use becomes more consistent at every level from the top-down, the impact and ROI inevitably become more measurable as a result. Together, leaders and employees can better justify the investments CEOs are already making—this time with the aim of reducing disconnected technology and achieving clearer, more measurable outcomes.
Setting Up Systems For Human Success
No matter what you call them—friction points, inefficiencies, redundancies—the beauty of AI is its power to remove them from business (and life) in a way and at a scale never seen by humanity before. When we embrace AI's ability to streamline processes, we empower real people to embrace more thoughtful and strategic tasks that not only contribute to company growth and development but their own as well.
Before any employee or employer starts running toward that kind of impactful ROI, it's important to build a foundation that allows the entire organization to first crawl, then walk.
It's simple: Get everyone working inside an AI platform. Doesn't matter the system(s); what does matter is that employees are implementing substantial use into their daily work tasks. Doing so not only increases familiarity and proficiency, but has also been reported to improve productivity, quality of work and customer engagement.
Whether it's industry knowledge, company data or company processes, it's critical to teach the robots to "think" about internal business information like one of your own.
Using an AI platform that is enhanced with your company data will replace AI hallucinations with informed and actionable insights that help instead of hindering the work of employees.
Instead of relying on SaaS providers built on old software models with closed tech, make your own. Pull all the company data you can from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, financial platforms and human resource information systems (HRIS) to create a repository of data that an enterprise AI model can layer on top of.
This establishes a single source of truth for the tech (and for your employees) to ensure everyone and everything is working with the same information, unique to the company and its current state of business, which 72% of CEOs believe is key to unlocking the value of gen AI.
The mistake many non-technical CEOs make is building a new tool or technology on top of their AI data warehouse to explore new ideas that aren't proven or planned for. Instead, they should be starting small—looking for opportunities to recoup their investment made in the first three steps.
Look for a use case where AI can improve the client or employee experience, the product or the service. This is where implementing AI agents on your data warehouse can address targeted challenges and produce a clear return on investment (ROI).
Growing Talent Through The Use Of Tech
The rise of gen AI is not replacing human talent—it's elevating it. When thoughtfully integrated, AI becomes a partner in onboarding, training and upskilling employees so they can confidently take on bigger, more complex challenges while the tech manages the routine ones.
We know 87% of business leaders anticipate that at least a quarter of their workforce will require reskilling as a direct result of AI and automation. So why not let AI help in that process?
Onboarding, for instance, no longer needs to be a bottleneck. The challenge of training remote workers or virtual assistants has largely been addressed through tools like ChatGPT, which can generate customized onboarding programs in minutes.
These AI tools effectively act as in-house trainers, HR support, data analysts, coaches and even thought partners, freeing up human capacity for the high-value, strategic work like creative problem-solving and leadership.
Because I run a virtual assistant company, it's a common misconception that I want humans to do every task. The important distinction here is that I want humans doing the critical tasks.
It's not about choosing humans over AI or AI over humans; it's about creating an environment where they coexist and collaborate in a way that creates efficiencies for your company while opening the door to more opportunities for your employees.
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