Will McMahon

We want everyone to understand AI, not just the specialists. The challenge that stems from that is that we're starting from a very low base and that can be daunting for people without technical knowledge. What we recommend to our staff is to play with AI in their personal lives, the beauty of tools like Chat GPT is that they can be used for almost any task. By using it for cooking, travel planning, purchase advice our staff better understand gen AI but also how end users might interact with it. It also neatly avoids issues around staff learning on confidential data. Once we've got a mass of active users we bunch up the ones that are most keen with more experienced technical users and start hacking together business solutions.

Bringing the team on the journey is critical. Not only does it allow them to learn and develop to be leaders in their own right but the power of the latest AI tools is that anyone can use them to improve efficiency or quality of work. But how do you get them started? The easiest way to get teams involved is to task them with using AI tools in the personal lives. Then you don't have to worry about privacy and they quickly start to learn how AI can help them day to day. From there they can start to apply AI to their roles and suddenly you've got large portions of a workforce that are driving efficiencies or improving quality and sharing amongst themselves.

9 out of ten times, the clashes I see arise from different teams not understanding what the other does. We found that a small amount of training around the roles of other teams and why that was important (or couldn't easily be changed) was really helpful on building a base layer of empathy which teams could then build upon

I see a lot of examples of work done with AI that goes undervalued because others don't understand the business impact of their work. Try to understand the language amd communication of your audience and tailor your work to specifically address the challenges they face. If that's not your strong suit, try and develop a relationship with someone in that team that can help tell your story through a business lens that will land with your desired audience

Salary negotiation requires three things: 1) Benchmarking - know what the boundaries of salary are and have a realistic goal. Check glassdoor or recruiter data to get these figures 2) Evidence - demonstrate and quantify your effect on your business. "I created x tool that saved y billable hours, annual valued at $z" 3) Grit - Negotiating for pay is hard. It requires confidence and having to go through an awkward dance. Believe in yourself and what you're worth (and more work in steps 1 and 2 will help you be that much more confident in this)