Why you need a workplace AI strategy
This page is part of The Workplace AI Strategy Guide
This page is part of a step-by-step guide to Workplace AI strategy, which I'm currently in the process of writing. I'm creating it like an interactive online book. The full table of contents is on the left (or use the menu if you're on a mobile device).
What's this guide all about? Check out the intro or full table of contents.
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This page is incomplete!
This page is part of my step-by-step guide to Workplace AI, which I'm in the process of writing. I'm doing it in the open, which allows people to see it and provide feedback early. However many of the pages are just initial brain dumps, bullets, random notes, and/or incomplete.
There's an overview of what I'm trying to accomplish on the "What is this site about?" page.
Want to stay updated pages get major updates or things are added? I have a news feed specifically for guide content here: RSS feed for guide updates .
—Brian (July 2024)
In today’s workplace, AI is no longer a vague futuristic concept, rather, it’s the present reality that’s reshaping how regular employees work, communicate, and make decisions. Whether you’re a small startup or a huge multinational corporation, the question isn’t if AI will impact your workplace, but how you’ll manage the impact which has already begun. (Note that this isn’t “it’s not if, but when”, rather, this is “it’s not if, and it’s not when, it’s already happening now.“)
This chapter explores the critical need for why you need a workplace AI strategy, covering why it matters, what you can realistically achieve, and how your employees, customers, suppliers, and partners are already using AI (possibly without you even realizing it).
As we walk through this topic, you’ll see that having “no strategy” for workplace AI is, in fact, a strategy in itself (and often a bad one). We’ll look at the implications of employee AI use on productivity, efficiency, and decision-making, and look ahead to the future of AI use in the workplace. By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand why a proactive strategy for dealing with employee AI use is not just advisable, but essential for staying competitive and creating a workplace that thrives in the AI era.
In this chapter:
- Because you already have one
- Why should you care?
- Is AI strategic or important now?
- What can you realistically achieve?
- Will you drive a strategy, or take a hands-off approach?
- How AI affects productivity, efficiency, and decision-making
- The future of AI in the workplace
You already have a workplace AI strategy!
The main thing I’m going to try to convince you in this chapter is that you need to have a strategy for dealing with AI. I don’t care what your strategy is—I just want to make sure that you—or someone—at your workplace has actually thought through the implications of all your employees using AI tools.
That said, there’s an old business joke about “having no strategy is still a strategy,” and that’s definitely true here. Because these workplace AI tools are available directly to employees, and because they can use them on their own without telling the company, the reality is that every company already has a workplace strategy, whether you know it or not!
Think you don't need a strategy for AI in your workplace?
YOU: We are not going to set a workplace AI strategy.
TRANSLATION: We’re going to let our employees each figure this out on their own, so some will use AI and some won’t, some people will understand the risks and some won’t, and I’m just going to hope they sort this all out and things work out for the best!
If this is your plan, I hope I can convince you to keep reading.
If you decide that you don’t want to real with workplace AI, and you really do want to let each of your employees figure it out on their own, I am 100% fine with that. No prob! All good! But I will only support that if you consciously decide that’s the best plan for your company after fully understanding the ramifications and what’s happening out there.
Why should you care about workplace AI?
Even if you’ve never heard of “workplace AI” until right now, and you’ve never talked about it or thought about it at work, you most likely have some employees slowly becoming ChatGPT experts and using it for more and more, while others have never heard of it and keep doing things the old way. Most likely you also have unknown security and compliance issues you also don’t know about. This is really like the “consumerization of IT” or “shadow IT” that was a hot topic ten years ago where individual employees were doing things with tech that the company didn’t know about.
Is AI strategic or important now?
You’ll read a lot, about faster decision making, etc.
To me, it’s really about this is where things are heading. You can get in front of it, or not.
And if you don’t believe it and think it’s all hype, I mean, it’s real today.
The GPT models are getting better. The products are improving. They’re coming to Apple and Google phones. So, this is happening, with or without you. Probably you should at least think it through.
What can you realistically achieve?
There’s so much written on AI (a lot of hype). People talk about efficiency and decision making and content generation and all that.
I’m looking at this from a higher level, more philosophical level.
You can create a workplace where your employees use technology to their advantage. Where you understand the pros and cons, the limitations, where it works and doesn’t, and help your employees automate the mundane things, super charge their collaboration and abilities, and enjoy being there. You can create a workplace where each new release of a GPT model means an increase in what your workplace can achieve, rather than a fear about which next rounds of roles can be done by AI now and made redundant.
Will you drive a strategy, or take a hands-off approach?
You need to decide if you’re drive a strategy, and where it will live. Is it an IT thing? HR? Executives? This can tie into your company culture.
Or you can be hands-off, and let individuals figure things out on their own.
AI seems like a tech thing, but this is as much about HR and your company culture as anything.
How AI affects productivity, efficiency, and decision-making
At the basic level, if AI is good at the “easy” things, you’d think AI can help by doing all the boring repetitive things and letting human employees focus on higher-value things.
But there’s also an interesting conversation about what people are paid for. If they only spend half their time doing the “valuable” things, and half doing paperwork, you’d think if AI can do all the paperwork that employees could double the amount of valuable things they do. (However this is tracked, number of articles they write in a week, number of customer demos they do, etc.)
But if they double their work output, and are “twice” as efficient, will you pay them twice as much? A lot of knowledge workers believe they’re paid for their output (which is why they don’t mind working only 30 hours a week as long as they can still generate the same amount of work product). But AI can uncover some pretty different views about the workplace that will need to be addressed and discussed.
The future of AI in the workplace
There’s a straight line on the log scale of AI abilities and model sizes.
More and more work will be able to be done by AI. They will be able to think about tasks longer, have higher level reasoning capabilities, etc. And this is happening now. GPT-5 is just around the corner, what will that unlock? What can you do about it? Can you adapt and adopt fast enough, before GPT-6 is released?
Is reskilling real? Seems like a platitude.
Is it realistic to think jobs won’t be affected?
If companies are just a collection of processes and algorithms, how much really needs to be done by human employees?
The AI expander / compressor loop. Can we get serious about why we’re doing all this, and start to get smarter about things?
So where’s this strategy I’m supposed to build?
You’re reading the Workplace AI Strategy Guide, so don’t worry, YES, we’ll walk through how you create and implement your strategy. That’s all covered in the 5 chapters that make up Part 4 of this guide. Jump there now if you can’t wait.
However there are several more technical topics and things we need to explore before you can start planning for your actual strategy, which is what we’re doing now.
Conclusion
As we’ve explored in this chapter, the need for a deliberate workplace AI strategy is not just important—it’s imperative. The rapid advancement of AI capabilities, coupled with their increasing availability directly to your employees, means every organization is already navigating the AI-powered workplace landscape whether they’ve actively acknowledged it or not.
By taking a proactive approach to workplace AI, you can leverage the potential while mitigating the risks. To be clear, this isn’t about jumping on every AI bandwagon or implementing AI for its own sake. Rather, it’s about understanding the technology’s capabilities and limitations, aligning its use with your own company’s goals and values, and creating an environment where both you and your employees can thrive.
Remember, the future of AI in the workplace is not predetermined. It’s shaped by the decisions you make today. By developing a thoughtful, comprehensive workplace AI strategy now, you’re just just preparing for the future—you’re actively creating it. Whether you choose to be at the cutting edge of AI adoption, or to take a more measured approach, the key is to make your choice consciously and strategically.
As you move forward, consider how workplace AI fits into your broader organizational strategy, how it aligns with your company culture, and what steps you need to take to ensure its responsible and effective use. The workplace AI revolution is clearly here. The question for you is how you’ll lead your organization through it.