With AI steadily reshaping the workplace, the demand for workers skilled in leveraging this technology is surging. While companies are eager to capitalise on this technology to boost productivity, many are missing a crucial step: equipping their workforce with the training and guidance needed to unlock AI’s full potential. Organisations aren’t going the distance needed to align their employees with the tech provided. In fact, the majority of workers in the UK educate themselves about AI by reading articles about AI (40%) and experimenting with AI tools on their own (41%) with only 28% acquiring skills through work-sponsored AI training.
What is needed to make AI work?
For AI to truly work among teams, it starts with making the technology accessible and easy to understand. Especially with generative AI, it is only as effective as the prompts it receives so entering clear and relevant information is crucial if you want it to produce meaningful results. For example, when brainstorming ideas for a product launch, specifying the target market, key messaging and desired tone ensures more useful AI-generated insights. The more context and clarity provided, the more relevant and impactful the AI’s responses will be.
If people don’t feel qualified to use generative AI, they may decide to simply avoid it altogether. Concerns about reliability and security can deter people from exploring its potential benefits. Overcoming this requires clear guidelines on responsible AI use, along with opportunities for hands-on experimentation in daily work. Leadership plays a crucial role—executives should not only establish clear policies but also actively engage with AI tools themselves. First-hand experience helps them understand the technology’s limitations, set realistic expectations, and model safe, effective usage for their teams.
Increasing team efficiency with AI
Team collaboration can be supercharged with AI. Beyond generating fresh ideas and iterating on them, certain models like Lucid’s AI capabilities take it a step further by automatically generating accurate diagrams, which saves teams valuable hours on manual tasks to allow them to focus their limited time on higher-value tasks.
One of AI’s most impactful benefits is its ability to serve as a tailored knowledge base by ensuring relevant information is carried between projects. This can drastically reduce the time employees spend searching for information – currently over a quarter (27%) of workers lose over ten hours a week to this task.
The capacity for generative AI to analyse prior work, create documentation, and act as a single source of truth for teams is rapidly cementing it as an important part of how teams will operate going forward. This is especially valuable at a time where 54% of organisations report difficulties in balancing employee productivity in hybrid and remote settings. In these cases generative AI
mitigates both team-level alignment issues and wider organisational issues, helping teams break down silos and boost productivity.
Working with generative AI
Generative AI helps people work together in a faster and more efficient way. But simply adopting the technology isn’t enough to deliver the game-changing results leaders hope for. To truly unlock its potential, businesses must invest in equipping their teams with the skills and confidence to use it effectively—both to enhance individual productivity and to elevate collaboration across the board