Artificial Intelligence is not the enemy. Despite the legitimate fears surrounding its misuse and its looming potential to replace the human workforce, there are many real-world applications of generative AI for employees and employers alike. Creative use of AI in the workplace can help employees get familiar with the technology while inhibiting their apprehension about working with it.
Most organizations have a very preliminary understanding of AI and its capability to generate texts and images, but the content that can be created can serve as a springboard for a deeper understanding of any project. Helping employees get comfortable with generative AI and encouraging them to explore its uses can help the organization uncover new strategies that will be beneficial for the enter organization.
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Promoting the Use of Generative AI for Employees Is in Everyone’s Best Interest
Generative AI has many applications that are considerably more beneficial than just using it to create content for the company blog. Organizations have started growing more comfortable with using AI in the hiring process and many HRIS systems have embraced AI within their services as well. These systematic applications are heartening to see, but employees rarely have occasion to witness them in action and get familiar with their uses.
Generative AI has not evolved to a stage where the content generated matches the quality of something that is made by an actual worker, so it is impractical to use its results without altering or reviewing them first. However, the technology has reached a point where it can create first drafts and samples of content that allow an employee to cut down on the time spent manually writing out the content. This helps them invest time and energy in perfecting the content instead.
There may be areas where a business does want generative interference so organizations can begin by identifying these segments and setting them aside for the future when it is more prepared to test AI capabilities in these fields. Generating content for legal documents, employee policies, contracts, and files on proprietary company information is best handled by experienced staff members.
With serious content kept out of the way, employers should encourage employees to get creative with AI usage in the workplace and establish a space where they can share their ideas or discoveries for the benefit of the team.
5 Ways to Explore Generative AI Applications in the Workplace
The opportunities for generative AI applications are entirely dependent on the industry and the work done at an organization. However, there are some strategies that we can recommend that any organization might be able to benefit from.
1. Encourage Employees to Reimagine Their Work
Employees are the ones with the best understanding of what their everyday tasks involve. In order to push them to think about the creative uses of AI in the workplace, employees should first be encouraged to evaluate their responsibilities and chart out the tasks that involve the most amount of work or those that are the most repetitive.
For example, if these employees have to frequently track meetings and spend a lot of time summarizing these sessions to create records of what was discussed, there are specific AI tools that can generate meeting notes on key points that were finalized during the meeting.
Although the employee may still have to read through the notes to ensure they are accurate, this can be much quicker than writing and rewriting everything from scratch.
2. Generating an Outline for Projects and Product Briefs
AI-generated content should be avoided on websites and other platforms that represent the company, but these tools can be very useful for generating representations of ideas for internal communications. AI tools can take content and present it in a desired format and as such, it can help employees create their presentations and briefs in a more digestible form to share with their teams.
The structured formats and design ideas can help employees put their thoughts together in a more clear and concise manner, even using images to represent concepts that they might not be able to explain as efficiently. Getting the hang of AI tools for this purpose can be tricky, but once employees devise their own prompts and instructions, their other tasks can move at a much faster pace.
3. Enhancing the Onboarding Process
Another way to optimize generative AI for employees is to embrace it as a part of the onboarding process. New hires are regularly confronted by huge piles of information about the organization and its role, and understanding and remembering all of it can be difficult. AI tools trained on company data can be used as an assistant to help clarify certain concepts to employees and summon data that the employee is unsure about.
Managers, mentors, and coworkers still need to be actively involved in the onboarding process to help the employee understand their responsibilities, but they are not always available immediately. While a new hire waits to hear back from their manager, they can occasionally turn to these AI tools to go over content again and review it whenever they need over the first few months of settling in.
4. Analyzing Large Volumes of Data
AI tools can be very efficient at processing data quickly and providing it back to the user in smaller chunks that are easier to consume. Employees who are moved to a new project or have to catch up to what the rest of the team is working on can benefit from AI tools that are able to break down concepts from them in the short term, summarizing key data points that they can use to enhance their understanding of the documents.
The AI can classify the content, create topics, design activities, etc. These tools are capable of determining actionable points from the data and employees can use them to create guidelines and timelines, breaking a large volume of data into pieces that can be distributed throughout the team.
This way, generative AI can improve their productivity and help them work with the data rather than forcing them to comb through it multiple times before they can do anything with it.
5. Identify Errors and Risk Areas
Even with tasks as simple as sending out emails, we rely on autocorrect tools to take care of any errors in our grammar and spelling. AI can take this one step further by helping employees change the tone of their email communication or adding the right amount of optimism and caution into the text. On a larger scale, AI can pick areas of concern in a plan or proposal on the surface level, which workers can then analyze and create their own strategies for quickly.
Again, the type of generative AI available for employees is not efficient enough to replace actual planning and foresight that is provided by the employees themselves, but it can be a good way to get started with the initial planning and resolution of overt issues.
The generative AI tools we have today are still in their early stages and have miles to go before they can be efficient, stand-alone systems. Despite that, organizations that explore and familiarize themselves with the current capabilities of AI will find it significantly easier to keep up with the tools as they evolve. Embracing and being creative with the applications of AI in the workplace will not result in a complete offloading of responsibilities to the tools, but they can enhance the quality of the work, help with early-stage planning, and create a more engaged approach to work.
