506 — Is your AI companion a colleague or rival?

If I start with you, lots of organizations are rolling out AI licenses.

There's this sense that there's this powerful technology with huge potential productivity benefits, and so we need to give people these tools to capitalize on those benefits.

What does that perspective or viewpoint get wrong?

I think what companies get wrong is actually not unique to AI.

It's what they always get wrong with a new program or tech rollout.

And that's the change management piece.

The approach is often like, here it is, now go make sense of it.

It's the change management that just continues to break.

And AI has only magnified this because of how quickly it forces us to make decisions as an entire workforce.

When you look at new behaviors you want your employees to exhibit, Part of a change management plan is role based learning where employees can contextualize.

Why them? Why now? And then also these very tactical questions, which is how do I do this? Leadership sponsorship is critical.

This means a lot falls on leaders to model behaviors before they fully understand it themselves.

So as AI licenses roll out, what I have not seen are leadership guides or toolkits or playbooks on how to coach employees and what behaviors they need to model.

and how to create a culture of experimentation where employees feel safe to fail live and learn quickly, all unlocked when leaders show how to learn out loud.

Again, AI has only magnified in our existing challenge of change management.

One thing I will say that is unique to AI and bizarre is how we're measuring success on a forever moving target.

AI fluency six months ago is now foundations because these tools evolve so quickly and culture evolves so quickly around it.

So companies default to vanity metrics, you know, like how many logins, how many seats activated, how many weekly users.

Not enough are asking if teams are working differently than they were six months ago.

So We have to constantly adjust our goals and be thoughtful about how we measure them because 100% adoption says nothing about how people are working and nothing about growth.

Yeah, just as you were speaking there, it's made me think about how similar this is in some ways in the L&D space to any kind of learning platform implementation where, as you were saying, the sort of change management piece around that is often not really thought through.

There's this sort of, well, we'll get the platform in place and it's going to bring all these benefits and we don't tell people about it or we don't communicate it to leaders and managers who don't then communicate that down or role model it to their teams, slightly less fast moving, but we don't have maybe sort of metrics in place beyond sort of vanity metrics, like how many people are logging in, how many courses are they completing, that sort of thing.

So in that way, it's maybe kind of a familiar problem to an L&D audience.

I guess one thing that's, as you said, that is different here is the pace with which the technology is advancing, which does make it difficult to, there's this, it sort of creates, at one time, this sort of pressure to feel, oh, well, we need to do something because it's moving so quickly and we're going to fall behind if we don't do something.

So let's just get this technology out there and we'll figure out the change management piece and how to get the best out of this technology.