Level Up your Leadership

AI is not the future. It is already here

AI tools are being used in most workplaces. Whether your IT department allows it or not.

When organisations don’t deploy these tools, employees take matters into their own hands, using AI tools on their personal phones.

You can’t put the AI genie back into the bottle.

For leaders, the real challenge isn’t the technical deployment of AI technologies.

It is finding ways to actually lift productivity, without sacrificing quality. Avoiding AI slop.

To achieve this, organisations need to prepare their workforce with the skills needed to use AI confidently, responsibly and productively.

5 Practical tips to lift productivity, and avoid AI slop

Tip #1 – Invest in capability and experimentation

Adopting AI is not a one-off initiative. It should be incorporated into your process of continuous improvement.

You should always be considering how you can improve your workflows, decision making, and ways of working.

Leaders should create space for experimentation, and invest in ongoing skills development.

Tip #2 – Start with real use cases, not theory

The quickest way to build confidence is to show how you can improve specific real work tasks.

Identify particular workflows and teams, and setup some trials. Processes which routinely have bottlenecks or case backlogs can be good choices.

Collect data, analyse performance, and determine quality of outputs.

Tip #3 – Establish clear governance & guardrails

Trust matters. Your workforce need clear guidance on how AI can be used safely and responsibly.

Organisations should establish simple governance frameworks covering data security, privacy,
ethical use and quality control.

Clear rules can give your team the confidence to experiment and innovate, without unnecessary risk.

Tip #4 – Redesign workflows and adjust role designs

Many business processes are designed around interactions between people.

Not every process will be suitable for AI decision making, or automation.

AI tools might improve parts of the work, but still need humans to be part of the overall process.

Tip #5 – Build AI literacy across the organisation

Most employees are curious about AI, but uncertain about how it applies to their work.

Leaders should focus on lifting baseline skills and competency across the workforce. Invest in your existing teams.