Bridging the AI Training Gap in the Workplace

Many employees lack proper training to use AI effectively, which makes it a common challenge with using artificial intelligence in the workplace.

Microsoft and LinkedIn released released their 2024 Work Trend Index on the State of AI at Work, released in May which showed that only 39% of AI users receive workplace training.

According to the report, there are four categories of workers: skeptics, reluctant users, poorly or untrained users, and power users.

The research is based on a survey of 31,000 people across 31 countries, labor and hiring trends on LinkedIn, trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, and research with Fortune 500 customers. The results show how, in one year, AI is influencing how people work, lead, and hire worldwide.

The report says that companies are missing out on all the benefits of artificial intelligence by not applying it strategically. The lack of control also increases the risk of corporate data being hacked, as management pays much more attention to cybersecurity and privacy issues.

AI reshapes work environments, with its most significant potential lying in enhancing the human skills that define employee performance — creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving, noted Juan Betancourt, CEO at Humantelligence. This company develops individualized training strategies to better train leaders and their workers to integrate AI safely and efficiently.

Its tool identifies every individual’s learning style. The company’s AI-based training platform and maintenance methods are unique because they allow training through individually prescribed approaches.

The product focuses solely on teaching workers how to use AI in their jobs, not on other training objectives. Instead of offering a one-time, workshop-based solution, the software development firm provides a tool for ongoing optimization. It ensures that 90% of the company’s workforce receives continuous training across any platform or delivery method every day, every week.

The start-up’s initial mission was to use psychometric insights on employees to learn why people perform based on their psychology. The psychometric tool provided data on the behaviors of high performers versus low performers and provided an inkling of the different motivations driving their work styles.

During the company’s first four years, that insight ranking product became a recruiting tool based on algorithmic matching. Like a light AI then, the results allowed companies to select from the top five matches out of thousands of applicants for a position in any company.

Then Covid hit, and Humantelligence lost all revenue. Nobody was using software to hire. Nobody was hiring, Betancourt said.

The shift in business needs led to the first pivot — developing a platform for culture management. The platform used psychometric analysis to assess existing employees, which helped leaders and co-workers see an aggregate of their team’s culture or dynamics. This insight resulted in tips on managing or collaborating better within a team.

The final pivot resulted from AI’s advancements over the last 18 months. AI provides a tool for delivering exact insights for each person in any environment. Hence, Humantelligence built a better process for companies to train their workers to use AI.

There are prospective customers who do not move forward after expressing positive reactions in presentations about the software because it is expensive, it requires more budget, and they do not know the ROI.

Ironically, despite loving all the insights on training, some companies do not want them delivered through AI. They ask for a version with all the insights but delivered manually.

Another challenge is the lack of leadership structure to handle AI. Financing the training often falls between the CIO and CTO, creating budgeting issues.