208 | The 2 Things That Make or Break AI Success in Your Company with Isar Meitis

0:00Hello, and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And in today's episode, we are going to dive into two of the biggest questions that I get asked all the time, which are, what are the most critical factors in being successful in AI implementation company-wide? Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, you know that I speak on stages, I run workshops, I teach courses, and I do consulting for companies in AI. And that's all I've been doing in the last two and a half years.

0:34So I have a pretty wide range of experiences when it comes to implementing AI in businesses. I got to see the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. And so it really comes down to two main things. Out of all the things that a lot of people think that the limiting factor is access to clean data or having enough compute or setup of your IT tech stack and things like that, But the reality is the two main factors that have the biggest effect of whether your company will be able to transition to the AI era successfully or not comes down to leadership, buy-in and continuous education and training.

1:14That's it. Everything else has workarounds and solutions that may not be perfect, but are workarounds that will make you work and run and be able to develop things for your company that will make you more efficient and drive more revenue. But if you don't have one of these components, either a solid training plan and or solid leadership buy-in, your chances of being successful decline dramatically. And so these are the two that we're going to focus on today. And we're going to cover, first of all, what it means, what you can do as a leader or as an employee in each and every one of these scenarios, and what are the step-by-step components and the options that you have in front of you in order to actually do this successfully.

1:55Now, since literally everybody around the planet right now wants to implement AI and they want to be successful at doing this, I thought this would be a very helpful episode. And as I mentioned, we're going to approach this from two different aspects. One is from the aspect of the company looking for such solutions. So if you're in a leadership position, in an L &D, HR position, or any other that can impact the company as a whole, board member, et cetera, this could help you. But we're also going to address this from the individual perspective. If you're just an employee in a business and you want to be able to help either your company or your career or both, and we're going to address those components as well.

2:30So we're going to start with training because I think this is the baseline for everything. And I explain it is very, very hard to get leadership buy-in without the leadership actually having at least a solid baseline information what this means. And so a prerequisite to having solid leadership buy-in is the leadership actually having at least basic knowledge of where this is going, how it can impact their business, their industry, their niche, their employees, etc. So we're going to start with that aspect. Now, there are two types of training and they're not mutually exclusive. There is external training, meaning bringing an external person to train your company or sending your employees to different webinars or courses, etc.

3:12And there's internal training, things you can do within your company. The second one is obviously better for the long term. But in the beginning, most companies don't have a solid enough knowledge base in the company to actually do the ongoing training for the employees. We're going to talk about how to develop that as well. But that means that for most companies, you need to start with external kind of training for your employees. And there are four main ways on how you can do that. and going to go over them quickly and talk about the pros and cons of each one. So you have an idea of what options do you have.

3:47That, by the way, applies both at the company and as an individual. So the first one is self-paced courses. The internet is now full with millions, probably, of online courses, which allows you to sign up and get access to different lessons and different content and information and testing. And some of them even provide certification to teach yourself at your own pace on how to implement AI, how to learn the basics, there's different levels and different topics and so on. So let's talk a little bit about self-paced courses and see what are the benefits. Well, the biggest benefit is that it's very flexible.

4:19You can take the courses whenever you want, right? You can start a lesson, stop a lesson, go to the next lesson, go back. It is very, very flexible. The other benefit is that it's usually cheaper. So that usually would be your cheapest option on how to learn AI. Now, by the way, I'm going to touch the cheaper here a little deeper in this. And since we already mentioned cheaper, let's talk about this for a minute. People ask me all the time. They're saying you deliver free content all the time. If you're listening to this podcast, you know, I've been doing this twice a week for two and a half years.

4:47And a lot of other people are doing the same. Why do you even need a course? There's free content. And the reason you need a course versus free content is that it's more structured. There is logic from going from basic knowledge to more advanced knowledge, connecting dots together and taking you through a journey versus you trying to cherry pick different components and trying to learn on your own through free content. It's doable. It's just not very effective. And it's definitely worth the money. The ROI is through the roof. And so I never look about how much something costs. I look about what the ROI is.

5:19And the ROI of taking a course is significantly higher than trying to find the relevant lessons in a logical way that will actually drive results on your own or through somebody else. So starting with free content, listening to this podcast is awesome. Following me on LinkedIn or going to my YouTube channel or a lot of other people is a great start, but it's not solid training. For solid training, you need process, structure, testing, experimentation, and so on and so forth. So let's go back to the self-paced. So we talked about the fact that it's cheap and that it's flexible. The biggest disadvantage is that only 3 % of people around the world finish online self-paced courses that they sign up to.

5:58That means you might be one of those 3%. So I'm not trying to offend you by any means, but the chances are you will never finish the course. Now, since your goal is actually to learn AI and how to implement it successfully, having an instructor there, even if it's just as an accountability partner, is worth the extra time and money. The other big disadvantage is that there's no instructor. You cannot ask questions. There's no networking. And the networking part of it comes from A, being able to meet other people and talk to them and potentially find new partnerships or things that can help you in your business.

6:29But more importantly, it's another feedback into the course of questions that are being asked, how people approach different things that you're going to learn from and give you ideas on how you can implement it on your own. And the last and big disadvantage of self-paced courses is update rate. Most of these courses are being recorded once a year and sometimes twice a year. I actually update our self-paced courses once a quarter, but there still could be a quarter old or in many cases, a year old. A year old in the AI era, is a millennia, right? So many things have changed since the beginning of this year, just six months.

7:03And so these self-paced courses are usually not updated regularly, which means you're going to be behind on some of the topics. It doesn't make a big difference. On some of the topics, it's going to make a huge difference. So these are the disadvantages of a self-paced course. Like I said, we offer one, you can go and take it if you want. There's the big benefit of the flexibility in time. The second one is cohort-based online courses, meaning you join a Zoom call or some kind of an online platform, and there's an actual live instructor, and there's additional people in the course, and you're all learning together.

7:34The biggest benefits of that is, first of all, there's an instructor. You can ask him or her question. You can go deeper on topics that you have issues with and go faster on things that you know, depending on the rest of the class, obviously, but you can at least stop and ask questions for the instructor. It's always up to date. Assuming you're picking the right course and the right source, I update my course every single time I run it, I run at least once course a month, sometimes twice. And even when it's twice a month, the second course will probably be slightly different than the first one.

8:02A, because I get feedback at the end of each lesson, there's a questionnaire that people answer and I take it into consideration. And B, the AI things are changing. And so I'm continuously and consistently updating my courses. Now, the other huge benefit is, as we mentioned before, you see what other people are doing and you can brainstorm with other people and you can learn from them as well. You can network and meet people. There's engagement and a lot more of that. So there are huge benefits in the cohort-based courses. Disadvantage, it's obviously not as flexible, meaning there's specific times, specific weeks that you have to join in order to be in the course.

8:37In my particular case, you can get the recording. So if you have to miss a session, you can always go back and review it. In most cases, or in some cases, these courses are industry-specific. If they are industry-specific and you're not from that industry, then it's obviously going to be less relevant to you. I do our courses in two different ways. Some of them, most of them are actually private and then they are industry or company specific. But when we do publicly open courses, like the one we have starting on August 11th is more generic and it's open and relevant to everyone. So make sure when you sign up for a course, it's not for a specific topic that is less relevant to you.

9:14Now, the other disadvantage is that you cannot jump ahead or backwards, right? Because you're in a lesson with an instructor. You cannot say, oh, okay, I already know this lesson. I'm going to jump to the next one like you can do in the offline course. But if you do have access to recordings, then you can go back after the course and rewatch some stuff that was not clear to you or that you want to remind yourself because it was three months ago. Going up to the next level, there's in-person training events that could be a two hours to a few days. And in the small ones, the more of a workshop kind of environment, there are many, many benefits.

9:47Benefit number one, it's always a lot more engaging. and with the right instructor, it's more fun than doing it over a Zoom call. There's the team building aspect of this. If you're doing this as a company, it will be focused on very specific needs. So if you're doing a two to three hour workshop with an instructor, it's going to be focused on the specific needs of your team, your company, your specific division, your department, et cetera. And this way, you're going to get a lot more out of those two hours versus getting generic courses and so on. And again, assuming you pick the right instructor, is going to be up to date.

10:20So the information is going to be highly relevant to you as well as up to date with what's happening in the AI world. The disadvantage is that it requires some logistical overhead, meaning you have to have a venue that could be in your company, but you still have to plan it. You have to take people away from their desks. You have to have a room. You need to bring the instructor in and so on. So that's the biggest disadvantage. And obviously a time slot that is not flexible because that's the time the instructor is there that you have to do the thing. And then there is the holy grail, which I find to be the most effective.

10:51I've done this multiple times. And every time I do this, I see a huge impact on the momentum and the level of knowledge and the level of acceptance that AI is given within a specific company, which is a multi-day, hands-on workshop. I usually do it for two days, sometimes two and a half. And usually what we do is in the first day or day and a half, we spend the time learning a specific skill, then doing an exercise on it, another skill, another exercise, another skill, another exercise. And then we spend the last four to five hours doing a hackathon where the company breaks into teams. It could be a specific team within the company, such as the marketing team, the sales team, the finance department, and so on.

11:29Or it could be cross-functional teams for specific topics, specific projects. Each team is working on a specific AI solution that they need to do. I run between the different groups and I help them get to a working solution. That does a few magical things. The first thing that it does, it accelerates the process. Instead of taking a course over a month or two months, you're getting in 48 hours all the information condensed. Two, it gets people away from their desks, which is obviously a pro and a con. But on the pro side, it means they're completely focused on learning AI and they're not going to jump to do their emails in the middle of the lesson, like they would do on Zoom and stuff like that.

12:05So people are a lot more focused on that. It generates an incredible momentum because everybody in the company or a big group from the company is suddenly working on this thing together. And because we're doing a hackathon or developing actual things that people need, there is an immediate ROI. As soon as the workshop is over, you have four, five, six, depending how many groups you had that have actual solutions that save them time immediately as the workshop is over. So this is by far the most effective way to accelerate AI in your business. The disadvantage, A, it takes people away for two days from their desks.

12:40B, it's a financial investment, right? You need to find a place. You need to usually provide food, do some fun event in the evening, make it into a more of a comprehensive event. In many cases, when I do this, it becomes a part of the quarterly, semi-annually or annually get together of a team, a department, a company and so on. And so that dramatically reduces the level of additional logistics you need to have, but it still adds overhead to the process. The last thing that I will add that is as critical, which is the ongoing, because I told you in the beginning, it's about continuous education and learning, is how do you continue this going?

13:14You set up some kind of training for yourself or for your company. How do you continuously maintain that? How do you check that new tools that come out are not much more useful than what happened before? How do you verify that what you're doing makes sense versus maybe a potential other option? And the way I do this with my client is with weekly ongoing office hours. I do this with my community through the Friday AI Hangouts, meaning I have an hour once a week with anybody who wants. There's usually 20 to 30 people there every single week. It's at Friday at 1 p.m. You're welcome to join. If you want to join, there's a link in the show notes and it's nothing mandatory.

13:48Anybody who wants just comes in and join us and we just cover specific AI problems, things that people tried and failed, things that people tried and were successful, and they're going to share it with other people in the community and so on. In the office hours, when I do this with a company, different groups from the company grab slots based on the priority that the company sets. And we then review their specific situation. And I help them solve that with AI and other tools in order to get to the most effective solution in the fastest way. And we, in most cases, get to a working solution within an hour where we start in reviewing the issue.

14:21Then we think about different solutions and then we actually implement the solution. We either end with a working solution or very, very close with instructions on how the team can move forward with the goal of the team actually learning themselves how to do this versus giving it to me or anybody else to implement on their behalf. And then they haven't learned how to do it themselves. I'm a huge believer in teaching people how to fish versus giving them fish, because in the long run, you will need internal training, which leads us to exactly that topic. So how do you get to a point where you can drive internal training in your company without having a consultant doing all of that, or at least reducing the number of external courses and resources that you're consuming.

14:57So the first thing you need, you need an AI committee, a group of people that meets regularly, that understands the needs of the company and that can build strategy around it for AI. One of the things the committee needs to do, and sometimes it would be a subcommittee or a specific individual, they would be in charge of AI training. That person, together with the rest of the committee, needs to review the company's needs. What are the gaps between our current knowledge across different departments and the required knowledge across these departments? It's not going to be the same for accounting, marketing, sales, ops, customer service, etc.

15:27So you need to find the specific needs. You need to prioritize them based on ROI. If we solve this problem, how much more revenue will it drive? How much time will it save our employees? How much agony will it save our employees? That's also an important aspect of this. And so based on that, you prioritize what kind of training you want to deliver. And then you find the right tools. You develop the right process. Again, people from the committee, that that's their role. They will find the tool, develop the process, develop the training, deliver the training and track the result and then repeat the whole thing for the next department, for the next tool, for the next need, depending on the priorities based on ROI.

16:03So again, the process comes from, first of all, understanding your internal company and processes and where are bottlenecks and issues right now, have a good understanding of what AI is good at solving versus not good at solving because I see a lot of people trying to solve things with AI where AI is just not good at that particular thing. And then they're wasting a lot of resources on something that is maybe not banned to fail, but it's going to require significant time, money, and resources, where at the same time they could have solved 20 other things very, very quickly. So that's another important aspect is to figure out not just overall ROI, but also speed to solution and hence aligning the resources accordingly.

16:37And you can also then do regular workshops and office hours. One of the things that I recommend to many of my clients is once you do the training, you want to push people to continue doing this, meaning do internal office hours with the people who are experts at this thing. This means you need to identify the geeks in your company, the people who actually enjoy this and that are running on their own to learn how to use the tools and use their expertise to train other people. In many cases, top leadership can learn from younger people in their company who are already applying this and getting ideas from them.

17:07But setting it up as a schedule, as something that happens regularly is very, very important. So this covers ongoing education, could start with somebody external like me or a lot of other people are teaching great courses all the way and then transition over time to more and more internal training. The second thing that I said that is a critical factor for AI implementation success is leadership buy-in. So let's talk about what does leadership buy-in mean and what does it look like from a day-to-day perspective. The first thing, it means that the actual people at leadership are using AI tools, preferably the CEO and at least a few other C-suite members, but if not, at least one level below the leaders that people engage with every single day.

17:50That means that people in the company see you, the CEO or the VP, sharing how you're doing things, what are you doing with AI, how are you making progress. You can share this in your weekly meetings. You can share it in all hands. You can share it over lunch. make it a topic that you are actually experimenting with on your own, finding solution, understand what's going on, and share it with people around you. It also means that the leadership needs to clearly articulate why. Why is it important to actually learn AI? Why is it important for the company, for the success of the business, and for the individuals to understand why this initiative is important for the future of the company?

18:27In many cases, this could make or break the future of the company. There are many companies that if they don't take action right now will cease to exist in four to 10 years. If you are in a leadership position in a company and you think that cannot happen to you, then you better start thinking bigger questions. Yes, many companies are going to be impacted less, but there's many, many business leaders that I meet regularly saying, well, it's not going to have a big impact on our industry. And they just didn't think it deeply enough, or they don't understand what AGI or ASI actually means and how fast it's actually coming and what impact that can have on their industry and on their business.

19:01So that's defining a very clear why and going back to this across the board with everything that they do. The next component is integrating AI into the cadence of everything you do, meaning in every meeting, ask, how can AI do this thing better? Every problem the company has, can we use AI to solve either this entire problem or components of this problem? What is the AI angle of this problem? I can tell you that in my business, I do almost 100 % of everything that I do with AI assistant. It's not always replacing the whole process. In most cases, it does not, but it is a participant in every aspect of everything that I do.

19:36And it happened not overnight. It happened because through the last two and a half years, I've developed a muscle, a lens that I can look through and see everything through the AI lens. Can AI help me solve this problem? In many cases, the answer is yes. If the answer is yes, I will free the time to find the way to implement this. This could be me or hiring an external somebody to help me implement an AI solution, which is exactly one of the things that is very clear for leadership buying, which is allocating resources, time and money for themselves, the leadership team, as well as the company as a whole.

20:08Meaning going beyond saying, oh, this is important. You need to implement AI. Go learn AI. Do AI is actually setting up training with an external consultant, freeing up time for workshops, freeing time for people's calendars, actually freeing time for them to experiment with specific AI tools, freeing time for the right people to be a part of the AI committee, freeing time for people in order to train other people. So yes, you're a developer and you have a full-time stack and things that you need to do, but on these two hours a week, you're gonna train people from the team on how to do one, two, three.

20:40That is time allocation. The same thing comes to budget. Does the leadership give people access to tools to experiment with different things? Do they provide a staging environment where you can safely experiment with fake data that looks like the real data so you can actually see if things are going to work or not? Do you have access to a tech stack? Do you have access to the IT department to set things up for you and so on and so forth? If a leadership is buying, all these things become a no-brainer and becomes obvious and it's a lot easier to run forward in such an environment. The next thing is championing experimentation culture, meaning if you're in a leadership position, experimenting with AI tools, experimenting with AI solutions should be the first nature of every person in your company.

21:25That needs to be the first thing people think about. And that comes from defining that as part of the company's culture. It is okay to experiment. It is actually promoted, meaning go experiment with this, go try that. In many of the companies that I work with, we create some kind of a game, a gamification of the whole process. People, either individuals or groups, compete against each other with what kind of AI solutions they found, how much they've implemented, how much money they generated or saved as a result of using this. And people win awards, A, for putting things in place, and B, for putting the biggest successful implementation of AI.

22:00So creating and championing a culture of experimentation is very important. Sharing and celebrating wins is the next topic. In your all hands, in your team weekly meeting, whatever the forum is, you want to celebrate AI wins. If somebody in your department did something cool or something helpful or just found a new way to do things with AI, share and talk about this. Award them one way or another. It could be as simple as taking them to lunch, but it could be something fancier. It doesn't really matter. What really matters is the accolades themselves, the fact that they get rewarded and that they get recognized for investing the time, for finding a solution, for deploying it, and for caring about the success of the company and applying AI in order to go the extra step.

22:44So these are things that a leadership that is bought in into the AI idea are doing. There's obviously a lot of other smaller things, but what are the benefits? If you're in a leadership position, what are the benefits? Well, the first benefit is obviously accelerated adoption and reduced fear. One of the biggest problem is fear. People are afraid of something new. They're afraid of the unknown. They're afraid it's going to take their job. They're afraid they don't have the technical skills. They're afraid that other people can do this and they cannot. There's many, many things to be afraid about.