Three Steps to Using AI in Your Organization

Artificial intelligence (AI) is such a hot topic because it has so much potential to change the way we work. AI can boost productivity, cut costs, foster innovation, and create content. And that’s just the beginning. Some say AI is the next industrial revolution.

But how do we use AI in our organizations? What steps can we take to successfully adopt this new technology?

Employees have two questions when big changes are coming. The first is, “What’s going to happen to me?” The second is, “What’s going to happen to me?” No, that’s not a typo. The question is so important it bears repeating. And it’s up to leaders to make sure employees have the information needed to answer the question.

When leaders help employees see how they can use AI and benefit from it, employees see AI more favorably. Familiarity breeds appreciation. But there’s more. Beyond understanding the personal utility of AI, research suggests that there’s a relationship between trust and AI use. Building trust with AI positively predicts AI technology use.

Besides trust, anxiety is another related issue. Leaders who address key factors that cause employees to be anxious about using AI can boost its adoption. Research shows that employees feel anxious about using AI because it’s intimidating, they feel nervous operating AI in front of other people at work, and they feel uneasy if they were given a job where they had to use AI.

Here are three steps you can take to adopt Artificial Intelligence in your organization:

Give employees the information to answer for themselves, “What’s going to happen to me?”

• Share the organizational vision/values for AI, which should directly align with the organizational vision/values
  
• Clearly communicate how AI will support the employee’s role and what training they will have to leverage it.
• Include employees in the design or surveying of the AI solution, prioritize getting employee input for what’s realistically helpful as it relates to their job tasks.
• Create a place (such as an internal site) that keeps employees updated on all AI news and announcements.
• Drive home the limitations of AI while underscoring the importance of the employee’s role.

Build Trust with AI

• Assign an AI champion responsible for becoming familiar with AI and its potential applications to the organization. Deep domain knowledge will increase chances of success, and this person can help spread knowledge and raise support for the change. This person should have both an affinity for technology and a healthy skepticism about technology.
• Develop and disseminate AI policy and procedures grounded in an ethical framework. The policy should state where people can raise concerns about tools as they come across them and who is responsible for mitigation of the potential concern. Policies and procedures need to be adaptable as the organization learns its own dynamic with AI.
• Have a “human-in-the-loop,” specifically, an HR professional(s) who monitors or spot-checks AI-generated output before it is used. A human can identify ethical or reoccurring issues and take steps to mitigate them. As trust grows, human oversight could lessen.

Help Employees Utilize AI

• To set the conditions for helping employees see the personal utility of AI, it can be helpful to share beliefs and biases related to AI as a departmental group or team. There’s a spectrum of adoption levels regarding AI; some are early adopters, and others hope not to use it at all. It’s important for leadership (and employees) to be aware of the spectrum within their organization.
• Run a workshop where employees choose a generative AI tool and play with it. It’s helpful to have a prompt relevant to the type of work the employee group does. This can also reduce anxiety around AI, as key anxiety points are addressed as familiarity with AI increases.
• Have teams investigate specific AI tools and address how they could or could not help them with their work tasks. Have team members try to accomplish the same job-related task with an AI tool. After this, have the team share how they obtained and refined the information they needed. This could look different for everyone. After a few iterations, explore crafting the beginnings of an AI Use Toolkit for their job. This will help with AI norms and onboard new team members.

For more information, check out the research used to inform this post:

Park, J., Woo, S., & Kim, J. (2024). Attitudes towards artificial intelligence at work: Scale development and validation. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12502

Andrieux, P., Johnson, R. D., Sarabadani, J., & Van Slyke, C. (2024). Ethical considerations of generative AI-enabled human resource management. Organizational Dynamics, 53(1).https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2024.101032