Why Mastering AI is the New Essential Office Skill

There was a time when learning to use a fax machine was the must-have skill for office workers. I can’t remember that, but I am old enough to remember my first job at Channel 4 when email was first introduced. Before that, a young man wheeled around a trolley of memos in big brown envelopes with the recipients' names handwritten in boxes on the cover. Many resisted this techy upgrade preferring the tangibility of a piece of paper. Can you imagine?

We're at a similar techy office-life turning point in 2024. I know everyone is banging on about AI all the time, so this is not going to be about the big breakthroughs in marketing innovation. I want to talk about why most people are still metaphorically using the young man with the trolley of memos instead of handy email.

Who recognises the following day-to-day work scenario?

The Never-Ending Task Spiral: A Day in the Life of Modern Work

Picture this: It's Monday morning. You've had your coffee, you're feeling optimistic, and you're ready to tackle that report your boss asked for last week. Simple enough, right? Oh, you sweet, naive child...

9:00 AM: The Report Rabbit Hole

You open a blank document, fingers poised over the keyboard. But wait – what exactly did the boss want again? Cue 20 minutes of digging through your email to find that one message with the vague instructions halfway down a four-page multi-person thread.

10:30 AM: Data Detective Work

Two cups of coffee later, you're knee-deep in spreadsheets. Who knew finding the obscure discontinued forecast model from Q1 would feel like an Indiana Jones expedition? You swear these files are playing hide and seek.

12:00 PM: The Formatting Fandango

Report drafted! Time to make it pretty. Cue an hour of fiddling with fonts, arguing with AutoCorrect, and wondering why your bullet points have suddenly decided to stage a revolt. You give up and go to lunch. It’ll be easier after lunch.

2:00 PM: The "Quick" Boss Review

You send it off to your boss for a "quick look." Spoiler alert: there's no such thing. Your caveat that it is not formatted yet is ignored.

3:30 PM: Feedback Frenzy

Your boss's "few small tweaks" turn out to be a complete structural overhaul. Back to the drawing board!

5:00 PM: The Executive Summary Scramble

"Oh, and can you whip up a quick executive summary? The board meeting's tomorrow." Cue internal screaming.

7:00 PM: The Eleventh Hour Email

Just as you're packing up, an email: "Great work! But could we add a section on our new future focus that you’ve only learned about in this sentence? And maybe some nice graphics?"

9:00 PM: The Midnight Oil

You're back home, pyjama-clad, surrounded by emergency Uber Eats, frantically googling "how to make Excel charts not look like they were made by a colourblind toddler."

Tuesday, 8:00 AM: The Pivot Plot Twist

You blearily hand in your magnum opus, only for your boss to cheerily announce, "Great timing! We've just pivoted our strategy. Could you rewrite this to focus on our new direction? Shouldn’t take too long."

And let's not forget the fun side quests that pop up along the way:

- The "can you just" requests that are never actually "just" anything

- The meeting that could have been an email, stealing an hour of your life

- The urgent email that needs a "quick response" (after you've researched for 45 minutes)

- The client call that derails your entire afternoon

- The impromptu presentation you're voluntold to give tomorrow

Traumatised? We've all been there, drowning in a sea of tasks that breed like rabbits, each one spawning a litter of subtasks. It's exhausting, it's frustrating, and let's face it – it's not the best use of your skills and talent. Yet many of us still wade through this treacle day in, day out.

There will be many of you saying I don’t! I have discovered LLama 3.1 420B, GPT4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Midjourney 6, Groq, Perplexity Pro, Runway Gen 3 Alpha, Luma Dream Machine, and on and on… but most people you work with haven’t, and are essentially still drawing their slides on acetates for an overhead projector presentation rather than using PowerPoint in 1990.

All the above oddly named tools are here to change your life if you learn how to use them.

All of you now have a tireless assistant that will:

- Draft that initial report in minutes, not hours

- Find and compile all the relevant data while you grab another coffee

- Format everything to perfection without a fight

- Whip up that executive summary in seconds

- Generate future projections based on historical data

- Create eye-catching graphics that don't scream "I just learned PowerPoint yesterday"

- Rewrite and restructure the report for new strategies faster than you can say "pivot"

We've all heard the grand promises of AI. How it's going to revolutionise industries, cure diseases, solve climate change, and make marketing great again. Your company's probably talking about its cutting-edge AI partnerships with one of the above or that shiny new AI tool they're developing. Yet here most of the workforce are, still slogging through that report, still drowning in emails, still wasting precious hours on tasks a clever bit of code could do in seconds.

So what gives?

It's the perfect irony, isn't it? We know AI is powerful, yet we continue to torture ourselves with frustrations and mundanity because we haven’t got the time to learn how to use it well. We're like a person standing in the rain, holding an umbrella, and somehow still getting soaked.

Why is this happening? Well, we humans are a stubborn bunch. We resist change. We cling to our habits like a toddler to their raggedy bunny. Learning to use AI for simple stuff? That goes straight into the "I'll get to it later" box, right after "finish this bloody report" and just before "learn to juggle."

For some, it's the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Like tying our shoelaces. We know how to do it, so why bother learning a new method? But what if instead of a marginally better way to tie laces, we're talking about shoes that magically appear on your feet whenever you need them? AI can't do that yet (give it time), but it can do the workplace equivalent.

The truth is, learning new behaviours often seems mentally harder than it actually is. We build it up in our minds, imagining steep learning curves and hours of frustration. But if the reward is large enough and quick enough, that resistance melts away faster than an ice cube in the outback.

And make no mistake, the rewards are substantial. Studies show that AI can save employees an average of 2-3 hours per day on routine tasks. That's 10-15 hours per week, or 500-750 hours per year!

Let's put that into perspective:

For individuals:

- That's like getting an extra day off every week without losing pay.

- It's time you could spend on high-value work, learning new skills, or achieving a better work-life balance.

- Over a year, it's equivalent to 62-93 full workdays saved.

For employers:

- For a company of 100 employees, that's a staggering 50,000-75,000 hours of productivity gained annually.

- At an average corporate salary of ￡50,000 per year (or about ￡25 per hour), that's a potential ￡1.25-1.875 million in value unlocked.

- It's not just about the money – it's about freeing up your best minds to focus on innovation, strategy, and growth.

Human-to-human learning: This is where the real magic happens. Seeing someone breeze through a task that usually takes you hours. Watching another effortlessly generate a comprehensive report that would have been your whole week's work. That's when the penny drops. That's when you realise you're not just looking at a tool, you're looking at a superpower.

We need to convert people by showing them these fast, tangible rewards. It's not about vague promises of future efficiency. It's about the jaw-dropping, time-saving, stress-reducing reality of AI in action.

Imagine walking into work tomorrow and saying, "AI, draft a report on our Q2 performance, focusing on areas of growth and potential improvement. Include relevant data visualisations and an executive summary." Then imagine having a comprehensive first draft in your hands before you've finished your morning coffee. That's not science fiction. That's not some far-off future. That's now. That's what's possible when you embrace AI as your personal productivity ally.

So, are you ready to stop standing in the rain? Are you ready to finally open that umbrella and step into the dry, efficient, AI-augmented future of work?

The choice is yours. But remember, while you're deliberating, your competitors are already sprinting ahead, dry as a bone and twice as productive.

www.redbaez.com – helping all your people accelerate to the speed of AI.