AI Begins at Home
Willingness to adopt AI is extremely uneven. That surprises many technologists, especially those struggling to keep up with all of the changes in tooling and capability. Yet many businesses limp along with grossly inferior models, or severe token caps, or no AI use at all. Working in such an environment can be very painful.
Those in leadership positions may not care about adoption. If they neglect it for long enough they are in for a rude awakening. Those who want to foster adoption have to battle adoption resisters at every turn, among superiors, peers, and subordinates. How do you overcome such resistance so that the inevitable adoption starts as early as possible?
Try beginning at home. Subsidize employee use of the tools at home. Pay half of a subscription to one of the frontier models for your employees. Encourage people to share with one another what they do with it. The results will likely surprise and delight everyone.
Did they get creative? Eliminate repetitive tasks? Finish something faster? Learn something new? Figure out a nagging problem? Is their use on the bleeding edge? Probably not. And anyway, who cares!
It doesn’t really matter what they do, so long as they see the potential. After they become accustomed to home use, you can ask them how they would gain similar benefits in the work setting. You’ll have a new group of adoption advocates in short order.
This approach is inexpensive. For the cost of one lunch per user per month you can cover half of a subscription. It doesn’t compete with job activities. It engages people through what they care about. It invites them to share with one another for mutual benefit. And they can bring their new AI skills to the job.
If your organization suffers from resistance to AI adoption, begin at home.