The Change to Foster AI Culture

[This article was written in collaboration with Winnie Kroculick ]

The daunting scale and scope of what lays ahead in understanding, planning, and transforming organizations for AI, while keeping up with disruptors, makes people nervous.?

?? AI transformation ??

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Embracing AI universally to change how organizations solve business problems and interact with their customers,? needs to be backed by a meticulous change approach that will foster an AI friendly culture and ultimately speed up adoption.? In the end people drive organizational change but they are also the force that can sabotage transformational change if fear trumps curiosity and control.

Transparency at all levels and all times is key to keeping fear at bay. Providing access to learning and making choices of personal development available fosters curiosity and control throughout the process.?

The clarity of the challenges to AI Adoption is key to the messaging. The ability to participate broadly removes the resistance that comes from opaqueness.

Addressing the human element from the very top, progressively adding messaging details and cascading it deep and wide creates a flywheel of change fueled by energy and innovation. We have learned through examples of Cloud, Data modernization and Agile transformation initiatives, that when things start in the middle, the ground up autonomy of teams and the strategy from top get disconnected. You end up with a subset of transformation leaders pushing a transformation agenda not fully supported at the leadership levels.? This causes program failures and ultimately leads to costly stops and starts and the programs fall into a? financial abyss.? Human capital as a whole, becomes disenchanted with the organization's ability to lead strategic change.?

Organizations eventually arrive at their destinations but on the way the cost of rework, and the impacts to culture are high. The scar that it leaves behind influences the next round of transformation. Yet, it's not an option to stop transforming, especially in the case of AI.??

Falling behind in AI can lead to a negative perception in the market, causing customers, partners, and investors to question an organization's ability to be competitive

Every aspect of social and traditional media is talking about it!. In response individuals have a perception of AI being a threat.

The AI Genie is not going back in the bottle! This is happening!

The change approach and communication plan needs to think of the audience as a part of a bigger media consumption.

Step 1 - Replace fear with control and curiosity

Humanity is in charge of technology - take into consideration every human being this will touch.?

The scale of AI transformation will be as big as, or bigger than, transformational efforts to build digital commerce, migrating to the cloud, enabling edge computing or moving to agility. Individualized lessons from these journeys are the inputs to the AI change.? Specifically,? all the people that experienced the previous transformation journeys in the past provide the voices needed to planning and succeeding in AI in the future.? This includes those? that enjoyed success and those who were negatively impacted.? It is the? sum of those experiences that prevent the repetition of mistakes? and put Humanity in the driver's seat.

Step 2 - Customize the Course of Change

Engage leaders at different levels to customize messaging for their teams.

The change messaging needs to illustrate the bigger picture while including additional details that are unique to an audience based on the intersections of their location, function and role. This messaging starts at top and is elaborated and expanded as it is disseminated throughout the organization.? Bidirectional messaging is leverage to enhance and improve the future with each iteration.? It also influence the culture of change because it give credence to the fact that employees have a voice in the change throughout the journey?

Step 3 - Humanize options to transform individuals

Individuals own their destiny. Organizations leave no one behind.

AI transformation guiding principle is to eliminate waste so that people can focus on innovation and work that provides values.? As a result, scope includes everybody. This makes the size and complexity of changes from AI big and nuanced, with many unknowns. Identifying impacts and defining the individuals AI roadmap is a critical part of the change plan.?

The rate of technological change required that we move to agility.? WIth AI we need a new method to deal with this type of change.? The change is to human function, the day to day activities, inputs and outputs, risk type and the way we manage human talents must change.?

There is a need to define and refine roles for Language Model Training, Explaining, Promoting and Governing. The overall use-cases that will drive these models, will help map roles and job families that need to go through this transformation.

Creating choices for everyone to opt in to learn about the change and be part of the process to map their talent and preference to emerging opportunities is on leadership.

?It is an option and responsibility of each individual to make a choice to share feedback if there are gaps. The personal change arc is something every individual will have to own.

Step 4: Make the Pivot Clear and Simple

Collaborate to define the pivot

As we expand the nature of the transformations with AI augmenting, modifying, replacing or creating roles and job families, the change in communications needs cater two tracks -??

1. Program Impact Communications - are part of the program and initiative? teams involved in identifying use cases, prioritizing them, working on development and? integration of applications, data and model capabilities to keep everyone informed about progress, risks, dependencies, accomplishments and delays. This is the table stakes and we do this everyday.
2. Human Impact Communications - This is new.? This is for everyone, whether you are on the program or not. It is humanized with options to learn, enroll use cases, join program team, develop new skill sets, get career coaching so that they can truly make an informed decision about how they want to drive and adjust their personal change curve to the bigger transformation.? This is what is unique that drives? successful AI adoption.

The change approach, when leveraged, will create a space for personal growth with flexibility and choice that? will make this universal move to AI consumable for the people, their leadership and the organization. It will foster a sustainable Culture for AI.

?? AI transformation ??

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NOTE: The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not represent any past, present, or future affiliations.