Your Workforce Isn’t AI-Ready. Here’s How HR and People Leaders Can Ensure Proper AI Utilization.

~ By Ab DeWeese, bestselling author of Essential AI: Your All-in-One Quickstart to Using AI in Business and the Workplace

AI is quickly transforming the workplace, with more than 75% of companies using it according to McKinsey. But implementation is getting complicated. Only 25% of employees say they’ve received AI training, according to a global survey. A recent Gallup survey showed that while over 90% of Fortune 500 CHROs said their company was using AI, only 15% of employees had received clear guidelines about how to use it. Without official guidelines from organizations, 78% of employees are bringing their own AI tools to work - often without managers knowing about it.

This is a setup for ineffective AI use which can lead to increased risk and low-quality output. 

AI systems are proven to produce errors and fabricated output (or hallucinations) some percentage of the time. Recent studies suggest that somewhere between 3% and 27 % of output is incorrect.  The problem is that people often can’t tell which part of the output is incorrect. The fabricated content can sound completely plausible. Without education and verification, employees will adopt the inaccuracies without knowing it. 

Recently, I heard a story from a Senior Product Manager who worked in a manufacturing company that had just given employees access to an internal AI system and encouraged them to use it. A junior employee on his team produced product documentation. When he reviewed it, he noticed immediately that there were critical errors that, if released, would have created a legal exposure for the company. When he asked his junior colleague where she got the information, she proudly said, “From AI!” She mistakenly believed that because the company provided access to AI, it must be reliable.  

AI systems hallucinating is not uncommon. What’s becoming even more common is people’s overreliance on these systems, without verifying or improving the AI output. This phenomenon, lazy AI use, is when workers use AI to produce content or output and they just run with the output they receive – with no verification and little to no human touch. Aside from hallucinations, sometimes AI output just isn’t good enough. It often takes multiple rounds of prompting, along with human editing, to create something that really delivers.

Here are 3 Must-Do Steps to More Effective AI Use:

Provide clear guidance on how and when to use AI in your organization.  In the story above, the junior employee did not  know it was possible for the AI system to produce incorrect results. The company didn’t share a user guide to AI. To combat this lack of knowledge, managers and HR leaders can provide educational material or training to your employees. This will help prevent forced errors that are easy to prevent. But in addition to this, add a feedback loop to make sure the employees are doing the training. In the case of the manufacturing company above, there were training materials offered, the employee just hadn’t looked at them.

Increase AI literacy in your organization. There is a big difference between using AI and using AI well.  Train your people to understand AI – how it works, what it’s good for, and where it’s limited. Teach them how to prompt the AI system to get better results. And importantly, explain the importance of people in the process of using AI. People should add their own ingenuity, creativity, and human touch to anything AI creates. This will  reduce risk. It will also help organizations produce not just more output, but better output. By equipping teams with practical AI literacy, HR leaders can transform potential risks into powerful assets, improving productivity, innovation, and organizational integrity.

Support Collaborative AI in your organization. Many organizations are allowing or encouraging AI use in hopes that their employees are more productive, but too often, people use it alone. According to Axios, in a recent survey of corporate leaders, 72% of C-suite leaders said they were facing at least one challenge in adopting AI, and of those leaders, 71% of them complained that AI applications were being created “in silos.” Organizations thrive when their teams collaborate, and that is equally true when you consider AI use. When managers use AI with their teams, it increases transparency, and opens communication channels about how the organization is going to use AI. This is an opportunity to get buy in from skeptical employees. But more than that, using AI as teams produces better content. Errors are more likely to be caught, and the work product is more likely to be higher-quality. According to Deloitte, when people work with AI and each other, the output is better.

AI is here to stay, so to get the most from AI in your organization, people will need to be encouraged to use it together with other people. AI is not just an individual skill, it’s a critical organizational capability that HR leaders and managers should cultivate.

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Ab DeWeese is a serial entrepreneur, investor, polymath, AI expert, and educator recognized for distilling complex problems into clear, actionable solutions. His new book,  Essential AI: Your All-in-One Quickstart to Using AI in Business and the Workplace, provides business leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals with practical strategies for integrating AI into their jobs and organizations while maintaining their human edge.   He is the creator of CollabChat AI, a platform designed to help businesses and teams harness the power of AI effectively, ensuring reliable, high-quality outputs through collaboration with AI and other people. Ab's deep understanding of how AI transforms productivity and decision-making has made him a trusted advisor to businesses seeking to future-proof their workforce and optimize operations.