Getting your team started with AI

AI isn’t about to affect your team's job. It's already here. The question is: are you helping them navigate the landscape, or are they doing it secretly on their own?

Employees across industries are already experimenting with AI in their daily work—often without official approval. A Salesforce survey found that 28 percent of workers are using generative AI, with over half doing so independently of their employers’ policies. Professionals across sectors are leveraging AI for tasks like drafting emails and client communication, often without leadership even realizing it.

At this point, every industry, every team, and every individual employee has something to gain from AI The challenge for leaders isn’t deciding if AI should be integrated into their organization—it’s figuring out how to get started, and ensuring that its use is intentional, strategic, and aligned with company goals.

AI has the potential to reshape your organization by automating routine tasks, enhancing decision-making with predictive insights, and personalizing customer interactions at scale. It can optimize workforce management by identifying trends in productivity and engagement, while also accelerating product development through rapid data analysis and iteration. But unlocking these benefits requires a shift in mindset—and more importantly, a hands-on approach. The best way to learn new AI tools is by using them.

So where should you get your team to start—especially if your organization has no formal policy in place yet, or hasn't invested in any enterprise-wide tools?

Here are five practical steps to help your team engage with AI on an individual level:

1. Encourage hands-on experimentation

If you're still waiting for an organization-wide approach to AI, you're most likely already behind. Encourage employees to explore AI-powered tools in their everyday work, while being mindful of uploading any proprietary or sensitive data into third-party tools. A few easy places to start that our team has experimented with:

• ChatGPT – The industry leader in GenAI for a reason. Excellent for brainstorming, and increasingly good at research. Also great for summarizing or synthesizing long documents
• Claude – Our team has found it to be excellent at writing creative content and generating new creative ideas
• Google's NotebookLM – AI-powered research assistant that helps summarize and organize information
• Perplexity – A powerful AI search engine that provides contextual answers and sources
• Napkin – Quickly drafts visuals and sketches to illustrate ideas and concepts. (The visual above was made with Napkin in under five minutes!)

All of the above have free versions for easy experimentation.

2. Identify low-risk AI use cases

The best way to build confidence in AI is to start small. Identify repetitive, time-consuming tasks that AI can streamline that will show immediate benefits, such as:

• Automating meeting notes and action items with Read.ai
• Using Canva AI for quick image generation for marketing materials
• Using Gamma to create easy, AI-assisted presentations that streamline design and storytelling for teams

3. Develop AI literacy across your team

AI isn’t magic, and it isn’t just for engineers. Every employee should understand AI fundamentals—including where its output is still mostly subpar. Consider hosting a workshop or recommending accessible learning resources like:

• Google’s AI Essentials (free online course)
• Fast.ai’s Practical Deep Learning for Coders (for more technical roles)
• Harvard Business Review’s "Building the AI-Powered Organization" (for leadership strategy)
• LinkedIn Learning course: "Embedding Yourself in AI"

No one needs to know everything. Aim for the 30 percent literacy rule: the minimum threshold that will gives employees enough AI literacy to understand and take advantage of the technology.

4. Start building an AI ethics and compliance framework

With great power comes great responsibility (and we have more power now than our ancestors could have ever imagined). AI can display biases, create security risks, and present hard ethical dilemmas. If your organization hasn't established company-wide policies yet, consider implementing team specific guidelines on:

• The use of proprietary company data within third-party tools
• When and how AI-generated content should be fact-checked
• Data privacy policies for AI tools that process customer information
• How AI-driven decisions should be monitored for fairness and accountability

5. Create a culture of AI curiosity

AI adoption isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing evolution, with new tools and models being introduced all the time. Here are a few ideas for embedding experimentation and curiosity into your team's culture:

• Encourage employees to share AI discoveries in team meetings. Set space for it on the agenda.
• Set up an internal channel (e.g. on Slack or Teams) dedicated to AI insights and discussions
• Celebrate wins when AI makes someone’s job easier or drives better results

Creating an open culture of curiosity is an important way to acknowledge and address employee concerns about how AI will affect their jobs. Openness and transparency are key to alleviating fear and fostering trust.

AI adoption starts with people, not policy

Policies will change and evolve slower than the technology. The sooner your team starts experimenting, the sooner they’ll understand how AI can support their work. Leaders who encourage hands-on engagement will see faster, more meaningful AI adoption within their teams, but it starts by modeling curiosity themselves.

How are you going to take the first step? Try out one of the tools above and see what AI can do for you.

And if you’ve already started, what’s working for your team? What tools or suggestions would you have for others who want to get started?

Take the next step:

1. Book me for a keynote presentation or workshop at your next event.

2. Read predictions from around the 18 Coffees Community on trends for 2025.

2.? Follow me here on LinkedIn, or watch me on Instagram or TikTok.

3. Sign up for Pocket Change, my monthly newsletter on disruptive trends and insights into the future of leadership.

4.? Let’s work together! Reach out to 18 Coffees for help with transformation and change.