The Workplace AI Strategy Guide
This project is my effort to figure out and create a practical guide to help us all understand the impact of employees using AI tools in the workplace.
What’s this project all about?
- AI tools like ChatGPT are really popular now.
- Employees are using them, often without company approval.
- This raises questions about productivity, security, and ethics.
- The nature of work and employer-employee dynamics is quickly changing, and most companies don’t realize how significant this already is.
- Should you develop a strategy to support this now (probably), or wait and see what happens as employees randomly figure it out on their own (probably not)?
- If so, what are the issues, what’s real and what’s hype, how to you plan, and what do you do next?
Who’s behind this project? And why?
👋 Hello! I’m Brian Madden (bio), a 30-year IT veteran and industry analyst/consultant based in Paris. I love AI, use these tools every day, and think they are fundamentally changing the way knowledge work is done. But also I’m highly skeptical of many of the vendor marketing claims about AI tools today, and believe most companies are in a dangerous “anything goes” / “Wild West” phase and don’t have a clear grasp on what their employees are really doing, and how AI use is affecting the company.
Explore what I’ve learned so far
I’ve written several IT strategy books over the years, but my sense is that this workplace AI topic is changing so fast that there’s no time to wait for a book. (Plus it would be obsolete as soon as it was printed.) So I’m experimenting with a fun idea: I’m sharing everything I write, as I write it, (for free!), completely in public.
This website contains my current working copy of what I’m calling The Workplace AI Strategy Guide. I’ve organized it into 5 parts broken into 18 chapters:
Workplace AI Intro
Core Knowledge
Impact / HR Issues
Creating Your Strategy
Implementation
This site is 100% human-written
Even though this site is about AI, no AI has been used to write or edit the content of this site. It’s 100% written by me, a human!
This guide is very much a work-in-progress!
I’m experimenting by publishing everything I write, as I write it, to this site. So many of these chapters are not complete. In fact, some are just bullet lists of notes, brain dumps, and pretty early collections of rough thoughts. It's like agile software applied to knowledge. A fun experiment!
If you want to track my progress, I have an RSS feed specifically for guide content which is updated as meaningful content is added or updated. RSS feed for guide updates .
Follow my progress & more
Blog
I’m writing about the hidden impact of employees using AI and how it’s changing the workplace. I usually write about news and do a deeper analysis.
Podcast
Audio version of my blog posts, and conversations about what’s happening in the world of Workplace AI.
Events & Talks
I give many talks a year around the world, as well as leading workshops, seminars, and conferences. See me live, or bring me to your event!
Videos
Videos of past talks I’ve given, video podcast recordings, and other workplace AI videos I like.
Contact Me
If you’re interested in this project or what I’m doing here, feel free to contact me! My bio page has my email address, LinkedIn profile, GitHub, and other ways to find me.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you and figuring out this thing together!
—Brian