Employees tend to view AI as a threat. This feeling forms a strong resistance that you will need to overcome to successfully integrate AI into your business.
If I told you that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the most sought-after technology in the business world, you would definitely have a hard time arguing. As a quick Google search can show, AI is reshaping entire industries, automating processes, increasing team capabilities, and transforming vast amounts of data into detailed insights.
Therefore, you can't blame companies for wanting to revamp their businesses with AI-based solutions – especially with the new normal pushing everyone towards reinvention. The pandemic brought new challenges and created disruptions that will be with us for some time. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that companies are turning to AI to regain their competitive advantage.
However, integrating AI into an enterprise is not plug-and-play. The process requires specific technical knowledge, a strategic approach to its implementation, all types of resources and the collaboration of the company's entire workforce. These are all huge challenges you will have to face if you want to take advantage of AI, but today I will focus on the last one. Why? Because you need to have your team on your side if you want your AI integration to be successful – something that is easier said than done.
Employees tend to view AI as a threat. Many of them have accepted the idea that AI is coming to replace us all, so they naturally feel threatened by its inclusion in the workplace. Other people are perplexed by the complexity of AI, while another group seems to think that using AI as it is today is useless. These feelings form a strong resistance that you will need to overcome to successfully integrate AI into your business.
Don't know how to do this? Here are some suggestions to get you started.
Take the time to explain AI to your employees
With so much information about AI floating around, it's easy to become overwhelmed and confused. Many articles present AI ready to take over the world and relieve us of our jobs, tasks, activities and everything you can imagine. However, the potential of AI today is far from all that, because AI-powered solutions are not sophisticated enough to carry out most of our human activities.
Unfortunately, this abundance of information can have a negative impact on your employees, making them believe that implementing AI in the workplace means they will soon be replaced by a machine. Your first task before investing in artificial intelligence, then, is to convince your team that such a thing won't happen anytime soon. In other words, you need to explain AI to your employees.
In doing so, you will have to try to cover as many facets of AI as possible. For example, you might start by demonstrating the capabilities of a modern AI solution (like a chatbot or automated marketing platform) and then discuss AI's potential and its limitations. Finally, you should always address why you want to implement AI in your business. This talk will likely have you discussing how AI will help each specific department become more efficient and productive.
Team up with AI enthusiasts at your company
Having a few meetings to discuss the benefits of AI for your company won't be enough to lessen your employees' resistance. You will need an ongoing effort to teach your team everything they need to know about AI and its advantages. Naturally, you can't dedicate yourself to this every day, which is why you'll need to form a small team of AI enthusiasts to help you.
Bringing this team together may seem complicated at first – but it doesn't have to be. When first discussing implementing AI in your business, try to identify the employees who are most engaged. Those who ask the most questions, who express admiration, who give their opinion, and who feel excited about AI are natural candidates to become your AI allies. They can be anyone at your company, from an HR manager to a high-ranking executive.
The importance of building such a team is that it will help you bring AI to your workplace. They will address the topic whenever they can, discuss new advances in AI, highlight growth opportunities that could benefit from AI during everyday tasks, and even lead discussion groups and training programs. Basically, your AI allies will naturalize AI within your company, thus helping other employees start to see it differently.
Building trust through transparency
Resistance to AI can lead your employees to not trust the technology’s results, especially if they don’t go against their beliefs or “their guts.” Therefore, it is important that you eliminate this part of resistance by building trust in AI solutions. How can you do that? Using AI systems, you can show your employees the insights they can gain, but not just about their specific tasks, but also about the company as a whole.
In other words, AI can be a great way to break down knowledge silos, providing bridges that can lead employees to better understand the impact of their work and the ramifications of their decisions. By doing so, you will use AI to promote transparency within your company, which in turn can provide employees with a more complete view of their work.
This may not seem like much, but it's highly likely that AI will end up validating some of the things your employees already suspect about their work. Use results that “agree” with your employees to show them that they can trust the technology, even if it’s just because it can predict the outcome of certain decisions in the same way your workforce can.
Make AI implementation as personal as possible
Showing your employees their place in the workflow and the impact of their decisions is just part of a larger whole. Your strategy shouldn't stop there, but go further to show each individual employee how AI can positively change the way they work every day. By personalizing AI benefits, you shift the focus from “general benefits” to “personal gains,” which aims to engage employees much more.
How can you do that? It will all depend on who you are talking to, but for example, you can show your HR team how they can analyze hundreds of CVs in a matter of minutes with the help of an AI solution. Or, you can teach your accounting team how to easily classify, categorize, and store different documents with the help of artificial intelligence.
These little demos can easily get your team excited about AI and show them that it's nothing to fear. In fact, that's probably the best thing about it: by presenting real AI working in a real scenario, your employees can realize that AI is not a replacement for humans, but rather a smart tool that can help and relieve us all. of tedious tasks and boring tasks.
Paving the way for AI adoption
While you can always skip all these steps and simply implement AI anyway, you will find that the benefits you expect from AI will not live up to your hopes. That's because you need employees on your side to successfully integrate AI into your workflow. Since they will be the ones interacting with AI-powered solutions on a daily basis, ignoring initial resistance is voluntarily running head-on into a wall.
Instead, take the time to pave the way for AI adoption, even before development begins. Be honest with your intentions, ask for feedback, ask questions, show as many demonstrations as you can and, above all, be patient. It will take some time for AI to establish itself in your daily activities, but if you follow these suggestions, you will get there in less time and see how your business will be transformed. Sure, it might not be as big a change as those advertised in certain articles, but you'll still be impressed with the results.
If you liked this, be sure to check out our other articles on AI.
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