AI Readiness: Mindset
When organizations talk about AI Readiness – they tend to talk about the technology. Training the model. What model to use. Datacenters.
The conversations aren’t “wrong” – but they are in the wrong sequence. Let’s take an old technology – email – and talk about the adoption of it. I’m old enough to remember the days of intra-office mailing. That’s right…for you young folks, we would print out a document, sign it, put it in a manilla envelope and put it in the intra-office mailbox. Someone would physically pick that envelope up and take it from the 5th floor to the 4th floor.
Stone ages, am I right? But we had email systems! Why not just send the document as an attachment? Why not just digitally sign it? The biggest two reasons – 1. Digital signing was still evolving and 2. The biggest reason? Adoption.
People weren’t comfortable with digitally signing. They weren’t comfortable with email attachments and working 100% digitally. They wanted the physical document. It was a mindset problem.
And this is the biggest challenge to AI Readiness today – Mindset.
Too often, a new tool or platform is purchased by an organization and deployed to the employees with very little buy in or training for the employees. We haven’t taken the time to help employees shift their mindset away from legacy thinking to future thinking. Instead of thinking about how the platform or tool is going to make hard work easier – they instead think about how hard it is to learn something new. They think about disruption to their workflows.
To really prepare for AI – organizations must start with shifting their team’s mindset. That shift must be away from reactive thinking to pro-active thinking. AI delivers problem-solving capabilities to front-line workers like virtually no other tool we’ve developed. But if we haven’t shifted front line workers away from waiting for IT to develop a solution to the front-line worker knowing they can solve their own problems with AI? They won’t use AI.
Historically, we’ve provided run-books and Standard Operating Procedures to front-line workers and told them to follow the playbook. But AI changes that. Rather, extracting the most value from AI requires a shift away from that.
In our organization, we had a front-line employee working through some configuration changes. We have SOPs written out to accomplish this task. However, this employee worked with his AI tools and developed his own application to make the work 10x easier. He’s not a developer, though, he does have some understanding of coding. But his mindset was “how do I make this hard thing, easier? How do I leverage my tools to find a better way?”
Because our culture encourages a different mindset – a mindset of courage, curiosity and exploration…he created an application that reduces his contribution time on this activity.
This is where real AI Readiness must begin. Organizations must help employees shift their mindset away from reactive problem-pointer-outers to proactive problem-solvers.
No amount of hand-wringing over which platform is the best or how to prepare your datacenter will lead to exponential value realization from AI – not until your employees have the right mindset to fully leverage this new resource.
