How to get your team to use AI

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I’m exploring how to implement AI in businesses and today I’m excited to show you what companies have done to encourage AI adoption for their employees.

I spoke with Stripe, Google, Intercom, Zapier, Figma, Vercel, Clearbit, ClassDojo, and Sandwich Video, and gathered information from other companies like Asana and Adobe for today’s post.

Overview of this guide:

• Reasons to get your team to adopt AI

• How are CEOs leading the internal charge on AI

• 9 ways companies encourage AI adoption internally

• Using hackathons to refocus and energise the company

• Benefits of internal tools for workflows and idea generation

• Empowering teams with initiatives

• The importance of pilot projects and empowering small teams to build without expectations

• Integrating AI into company culture

Why should you adopt AI at work?

Companies have been quite slow to deploy AI, with some exceptions.

Several studies show that AI boosts performance and productivity in the workplace.

Employees using AI assistants complete more tasks, finish them 25% faster, and produce higher-quality results.

Microsoft’s latest report states:

• Using ChatGPT, knowledge workers are 37% faster and deliver 40% higher quality.

• LLMs benefit new or low-skilled workers the most.

• 85% said it would help them get to a good first draft faster

• 72% spent less mental effort on mundane or repetitive tasks.

AI is becoming increasingly important in the workplace for better and more efficient work.

Companies like Microsoft are rolling out AI Copilot to all users as workplace tools integrate AI features.

Gartner forecasts that 40% of enterprise software will have Generative AI by 2024, and Forrester predicts that 60% of workers will use personalised AI for their jobs.

Take Zapier, for example.

Over 30% of employees now use AI zaps (workflows) to do work for them.

• 100x workflow template creation rate

• +$100k/month from new closed sales by automating Hubspot data entry after calls

• +50% increase in outbound sales booking rate using AI personalised outreach

• >10% of support involves AI—AI ticket summary, knowledge base semantic search by rep, draft generation, etc.

This is their percentage split of ChatGPT usage across departments:

Signal from the top

Many companies realise they need to adapt. And several companies are trying to position themselves as AI-first.

But there are challenges:

Top execs' commitment and buy-in signal the importance of this new tech shift, allowing the excitement to trickle down to all levels of the organisation.

Vercel aims to be an AI-first company, so the VP of AI, Jared Palmer, encourages employees to adopt AI tools internally which often means the AI features in the tools they’re already using like Notion.

Zapier’s Wade Foster quickly communicated the importance of AI for their business. Several internal documents were written on the topic and experimentation was encouraged.

Notion is internally pushing an AI-focused narrative, sparking curiosity among many employees about AI capabilities. They are also releasing AI features for customers, such as Ask AI, AI writing tools, summarisation etc.

Intercom is rapidly pushing forward on becoming an AI-first company.

What are these companies doing to encourage their employees to adopt AI?

9 ways to encourage AI adoption at work

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