How often do you attend a high-level strategy session on AI and end up leaving more confused than when you started?
Michael Bellows, co-founder and CEO of GoMaterials, will cover practical steps you can take home Monday morning during his session, “Tech That Works for You and Your People: A Practical Playbook for AI, Automation and Workforce Growth” on Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 9 a.m. at ELEVATE.
Bellows notes that what most companies get wrong when trying to implement AI is not addressing the culture, establishing accountability and measuring ROI.
Getting Employee Buy-In for AI Adoption
Bellows says one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of implementing AI is ensuring that your team is on board with this change.
“If you don’t set the tone properly for this with people and culture, and create the best people setup, it doesn’t really matter what you do because it will have a way higher likelihood of failing because you won’t be bringing people along with you,” Bellows says.
Bellows acknowledges that AI is currently perceived in a very negative light.
“We need to address that head-on from a people and culture standpoint, and you can make it really fun, and it doesn’t have to be scary,” Bellows says.
He advises talking through these concerns directly, including answering the question of whether people’s jobs will be replaced. He says owners shouldn’t pretend it’s not on people’s minds. Bellows says one difference it’s important for your team to understand is the distinction between a job and a career.
“A career is the sum of jobs, tasks, roles, responsibilities over your entire professional life,” Bellows says. “A job is what I am doing today. What are my roles and responsibilities today? So that being said, AI will drastically change and eliminate some jobs. It will never eliminate careers. That sentence can feel uncomfortable, but it is an honest one that is the truth.”
Bellows notes that change is inevitable and technological advances have been happening for hundreds of years. He says the difference with AI has been the speed of its adoption.
“If I said a social media manager was going to be a job at a company in 2005, people would have laughed in my face,” Bellows says. “What we need to think about is there are jobs that will exist tomorrow that don’t exist today, and there are jobs that existed in the past that will also not exist today, and that is normal.”
Setting Clear AI Policies and Employee Expectations
Before rolling out AI in your company, Bellows recommends breaking down what it actually is, so your team has a better understanding of how it works.
“Everyone should be able to clearly explain what is the result that comes back and why it comes back, generally speaking,” Bellows says.
You also need to have a clear setup of what you want to do and how you want your people to use AI. Have a written company policy on what employees are allowed to use it for versus where they are not, and what information can be shared.
“That needs to be not just an email that no one’s going to read,” Bellows says. “That needs to be email, and then maybe a meeting, and then a conversation, maybe even a 20-question multiple-choice quiz that you need to score 90%. There needs to be some accountability on it.”
He says a good rule of thumb on what shouldn’t be put in AI is to ask, ‘What would you not want to be forwarded without you knowing who the recipients are?’
Training Employees to Use AI Effectively
Another aspect of accountability is to ensure the team is actually using the AI tools. He says that if employees claim they aren’t saving time with AI, it comes down to a user issue.
“At this point in the world, you can’t tell me it’s not helping you at all in anything,” Bellows says. “That is a sentence I will stand behind, and that sentence is true for any role at the company.”
He says typically an employee failing to find value in AI is dealing with fear and anxiety, they’re in need of additional training, or they don’t have the time to learn and experiment with it.
“Some people are just drowning in so much work that they’re like, ‘The idea of changing and having to think about how to do this better. I don’t even have the time to do that,’” Bellows says.
Bellows says it is the responsibility of the leadership team to ensure their people’s workload enables them to learn and develop and get better every day.
He says while AI can support every part of the business, it’s crucial to ensure it’s not taking over human-centric aspects of the job, because then things become inauthentic.
“AI is your thought partner,” Bellows says. “It is not the thought leader. I am the thought leader. I am the thinker, and it is supporting me with my thoughts, challenging me, thinking differently, automating certain tasks. But I am still driving the thinking. We just need to make sure your team is enabled, trained, and equipped so that they don’t fall into the loop of letting AI be the thinker and then being the book cover.”
Bellows says if there are mistakes in a report where an employee used AI, they should still be held responsible for the results.
Measuring Time Savings and Productivity Gains From AI
The usage of AI can help companies grow faster and increase productivity, but it’s important to track both of these closely rather than going by gut feeling alone. Bellows recommends conducting a time audit on how much time each task takes in a month and evaluating what can be automated completely or to a certain percentage.
Some of the basic areas where AI can assist with include presentation building, thought partnership, reporting and analytics, CRM cleanliness and hygiene from a sales standpoint, and lead generation.
One tool GoMaterials recently launched is a sales analyst agent that helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks with their account managers.
“They’ll be able to see this email that they sent in a quote and then they didn’t do anything for three days and they’re like, ‘Hey you might want to check into that,’” Bellows says.
He says AI can take on administrative tasks and free employees up so they can think about the bigger picture. However, you also need to measure what employees are doing with their time savings.
Bellows adds that specific employees should own different KPIs.
“What’s happening right now is, especially with landscaping companies, it’s a little bit of everybody, and a 10% of everybody’s job,” Bellows says. “All owners of businesses know that is a recipe for failure. Because if everybody owns it, no one owns it.”
Ready to learn more about how to build a tech-forward culture? Register for ELEVATE, and we’ll see you in Tampa, Florida!
