Crafting Your Team’s AI Learning Experience: Lessons from Cosmic Centaur's Grow Day
In the fast-evolving landscape of Learning and Development (L&D), a staggering statistic stands out: by 2025, half of all employees will require some form of upskilling. During the 2023 #CosmicConference, we spent week 4 exploring the growing workforce capability gap and in our discussions with leaders, L&D emerged as a common bridge.
At Cosmic Centaurs, we firmly believe that continuous learning drives individual growth and organizational success. Unlike sporadic workshops that merely check boxes, we advocate for a consistent, thoughtful L&D strategy that nurtures employee capabilities and acts as a catalyst for overall performance.
One initiative for us is our Quarterly Grow Day. On these dedicated days, free from client work or meetings, our team spends time learning in ways that are tailored to their styles—be it reading, product testing, attending workshops, or conducting research. Our Grow Day the second quarter of this year took a deep dive into the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Why AI?
It's no secret that AI has the power to drive efficiency and optimization, and many are worried that it will replace jobs. In fact, nearly 1 in 4 jobs are set to change over the next five years and new jobs will emerge. But, at the same time, AI can improve business efficiency by up to 40%. So, as an organizational development consulting firm curious about the future of work, we set out to explore how AI tools boost our efficiency and productivity.
For everyone on our team, ChatGPT is something we now cannot live without. But on Grow Day we focused on finding other AI tools to help with every area of our work.
Our organization is not alone in looking to integrate AI into their workflows. In our conversations with leaders, we hear how they try to push teams to find and use tools that will drive productivity and performance, but the hardest part is finding where to start.
Rather than give you the lowdown on the tools we found (spoiler alert: besides ChatGPT, Bard & a couple of transcription tools, there is not much out there) in this article, we detail our approach to learning about AI tools on Grow Day in hopes that it will help your team do the same:
Designing an AI Learning Experience for Your Team
Start by identifying the tasks and processes AI can help you with: List the areas of your work that you believe AI might be able to support you with. In our team, we appointed a team member for each area and listed all the potential tools in that area of work for them to experiment with. There is no point in finding tools that do not help you achieve your objectives, so as fun as it is to play AI powered scrabble, it may not be helpful for your accounting job!
Begin testing with the low hanging fruit: Begin experimenting with ChatGPT or Bard - there are plenty of online resources to help you use them. You can also start with easy AI integrations on tools you already have such as Canva and Miro.
Document your experiments: As you test and try tools, create a shared document where the team can pool notes, learning and tools. This will help new joiners, or team members who are curious about a tool to look back and see what learnings were derived from the experiment.
Share your learnings: We ended our Grow day with a demo of our findings. Some of us shared visuals we created using AI, others hosted a demo on the AI tools that can be used on Google Sheets. This also allowed us to reflect as a group on the potential of tools we found valuable, and commit to trying more in the future.
Make it part of your ongoing L&D: AI is a capability of the future. If you don’t want to risk being left behind, it’s important to learn how to embrace it seamlessly in your workflows and to upskill everyone to be comfortable with using it.
What we learned
Sometimes no tool is better than forced AI: In our Grow Day we tried over 22 tools and we can say that there are plenty of options out there but not all of them add-value. In fact, if the AI tools don’t integrate with your workflows or processes, adding it in may lead to further inefficiencies or create complexity.
You will still need humans: You cannot remove people from the process. However, there are 2 types of processes, one that can be fully replaced by AI and one where AI can act as a supporter. Administrative tasks like note-taking can be done by AI, whereas tasks like research and analysis still require humans to make sense, edit, and validate the outputs.
Credibility & confidentiality: Be mindful of confidential and sensitive information. AI is still a novel technology and it cannot be fully trusted. You will always need to fact-check and use pseudonyms of clients or companies.
Looking for more resources?
Rewatch the sessions from week 4 of the 2023 #CosmicConference where we were joined by: Soussane Chartouny, Senior Director, EMEA/LATAM Field & Channel Marketing, who unpacked how to lead a global team, with a focus on building their skills. We also hosted Dr. Christiane Mueck for a discussion about skills development, gaps & reskilling talent in the UAE and Saudi.
If you need help learning how to adopt AI in your ways of working, book your one-on-one consultation today. We’ll be glad to help you stay ahead of the curve and work seamlessly.
