How to Address Employee Concerns About AI

Recently, a CIO from insurance company reached out to me, trying to solve the problem of raining questions about AI like “AI is here to take our jobs”, “We won’t use it”, “You’re just training it so you can replace us” Sound familiar? It’s funny because 71% of BFSI CIOs are ramping up generative AI use to improve employee productivity but over 56% of them fail because of low adoption. Employee concerns about job security, skill gaps, and ethical implications can significantly impede AI adoption and effectiveness. Here’s a Strategic Approach to harness AI's full potential & put focus on your teams: ⭐ Transparent Communication: Address AI's role openly, emphasizing augmentation over replacement. ⭐Comprehensive Education: Implement training programs covering AI basics, specific applications, and ethical considerations. ⭐Skill Development: Identify and bridge gaps in AI tool proficiency. Alternatively, find tools that have low or zero learning curve and no-code to encourage employees to try it out. ⭐Ethical Framework: Develop and promote AI ethics guidelines to ensure responsible implementation. Make it available to all teams to review and comment on. ⭐Trust Building: Create feedback mechanisms for employees to contribute to AI development and deployment. ⭐Leadership by Example: Actively engage with AI initiatives, aligning them with organizational goals. With this people-centric approach, I was able to work with CIOs drive almost 100% AI adoption for our use case with Alltius in BFSI companies. This not only addresses immediate concerns but also positions our organizations for long-term success in the AI-driven future of finance. What strategies are you employing to prepare your team for AI integration?

The #1 reason your internal AI tools aren't saving you as much money as you expected. At least half of your employees (and leaders) are worried AI will take their jobs. And that means they will sabotage your efforts to modernize your business. To be clear, the sabotage isn’t deliberate maliciousness. It comes from a place of self-preservation. You will find "ghosts in the machine" popping up everywhere. Things like ignoring the new AI tools. Doing things manually instead of leveraging automation. Finding workarounds. Quiet sabotage. You thought AI would get you all these time and productivity advantages ha. Now you still have people claiming they're overloaded with work PLUS you now have costs associated with building and maintaining your AI tools. Your overhead has increased, not decreased. Thanks for nothing, AI! It's the least sexy term in the corporate dictionary....change management. But, it's so. darn. important. When I was General Manager of Revel, we went from 3,000 users to 300,000 users in 2 years. 😬 So we needed to automate our operations heavily in order to even survive. I noticed something interesting though…for every new time-saving process I pursued, there was an equal and equivalent resistance from my people. It’s like Newton’s third law of corporate inertia. People (naturally) worry about how change is going to impact their jobs. So I took the time to sit with people who were impacted by new tech processes. I wanted to hear their concerns. I also wanted to hear what they wish they could work on. Then I made that thing part of their job so they could elevate their role and relinquish their hold on the existing work we were automating. This helped me build allies, not saboteurs. The key to integrating new technology or processes is not the tech or even the process...it's the humans. The companies who do this right will save fistfuls of money while boosting employee satisfaction and loyalty. -- I'm thinking of writing up a framework for how to implement internal AI tools that people actually use. Plus a few examples of which companies are knocking this out of the park. If you're interesting in something like this, drop a 🤖 in the comments. In the meantime, make sure you're following Lauren "🤖" Vriens for more AI insights and stuff.

I’m excited to be filming my new Udemy course on “AI for People Managers” aimed at folks who aren’t necessarily AI experts but want to help their teams use AI ethically and effectively. The great Allie K. Miller suggests that you encourage your people to experiment with AI for ~10 hours a week. This means you have to do more than offer begrudging permission. You need to demonstrate curiosity and excitement— even if you’re still learning too. Here are ten things people managers should know about AI experimentation: 1. Set clear rules upfront about what data your team can and can’t feed into AI tools, because nothing kills an AI experiment faster than a data privacy violation. 2. Frame AI as your team’s new super-powered assistant, not their replacement, so people get excited about what they can accomplish rather than worried about their jobs. 3. Start small with low-risk experiments like brainstorming or first drafts, because you want people building confidence with AI, not stress-testing it on your most important projects. 4. Make it totally okay for people to share when AI gives them weird or unhelpful results, since learning what doesn’t work is just as valuable as discovering what does. 5. Teach your team that getting good AI results is all about asking good questions, and yes, “prompt engineering” is now a legitimate workplace skill worth investing in. 6. Always have someone double-check AI outputs before they go anywhere important, because even the smartest AI can confidently give you completely wrong information. 7. Keep an eye out for AI responses that might be unfair to certain groups of people, since these tools can accidentally bake in biases that you definitely don’t want in your work. 8. Let AI inform your team’s decisions but never make the final call itself, because human judgment still needs to be the ultimate decision-maker. 9. Stay curious about new AI developments and limitations because this technology changes faster than your smartphone updates, and what’s true today might not be tomorrow. 10. Track more than just “how much time did we save” and also measure whether people are actually doing better, more creative work with AI as their sidekick. Let me know if you’re as excited about this topic as I am (and yes, I am learning alongside you too)! #ai #leadership #managers