AI has exploded onto the scene in recent years, promising business benefits through increased accuracy, productivity, innovation, competitiveness and data analysis.

But despite AI being frequently mentioned and offering diverse rewards, many businesses still haven’t fully embraced AI.

Many of the barriers to AI adoption revolve around user adoption. Gartner research found that the leading AI obstacles relate to your staff: including a lack of skills, fear of the unknown and not knowing relevant use cases.

Encouraging your staff to use AI is crucial to reaping the benefits. However, this doesn’t happen overnight. It requires significant behavioural change and new habits, which you need to guide.

In this guide, we examine how to change user habits and make your business AI ready, so you can focus on winning the rewards.

Preparing for AI_

Before you even think about getting staff using AI, you need to prepare your business. There are important considerations to make to ensure you implement AI securely and correctly, without putting your business at any sort of risk.

Here are three steps to take in your preparation:

1. Assess your business’s AI readiness_

Introducing AI into your operations can be a significant shift, so it’s crucial to know you’re ready.

Firstly, you need to understand what impact you intend AI to have, as this will guide your long-term strategy. Think about the pain points it will solve and the benefits you want to gain.

Next, you’ll want to contemplate your processes and data. For example, if you typically have very manual processes, moving to AI is likely to be a much bigger change than if you already use automated workflows.

By assessing your operations, you can determine how much effort and disruption will be involved, which may affect how rapidly you introduce AI. From there, you can design a tailored strategy that doesn’t overwhelm the business.

You’ll also want to consider the ethical implications of your AI usage, including how it might impact staff, customers, stakeholders and so on. Part of this means considering your data, including what you will and won’t share with AI, how you’ll keep sensitive data protected and how it affects compliance. You will also need to prepare your data, including labelling it correctly to control what AI accesses.

Our AI Readiness Assessment can uncover how ready your business is for AI and help you structure your data as part of a sensible roadmap.

2. Find the right tools_

Next, you need to think about the AI tools you want to use. There are now several options on the market, so you can find solutions that are relevant for your needs.

During this phase, you’ll want to consider things like the cost of AI tools, accessibility for users, capability, accuracy and any additional functionality. It will also be driven by the outcomes you intend to achieve.

Another crucial consideration at this stage is data privacy. Some AI tools are open, meaning the AI can learn from your data and potentially share it with others. However, tools like Microsoft Copilot are secured, meaning your data stays within the realms of your business. This enables you to be more compliant and reduces data being leaked to competitors.

3. Outline your AI policy_

Finally, it is integral to set out an official AI policy. This will define how staff use AI safely and ethically.

Some contemplations in this stage include:

• How should people use AI and not use AI?
• How should people protect data?
• Can every role use AI?
• Should everyone use only approved tools or is there free reign?
• How will AI output be checked?

The answer to these questions will solidify your policy, which should also be communicated to staff clearly.

AI usage stats to bear in mind_

Understanding how people use AI and their attitudes can be crucial to knowing the best way to manage the transition. We’ve put together some stats, based on leading research from Microsoft, to guide your AI adoption.

• 78% of executives believe AI is critical for their organisation to succeed and worth the investment of money, time and effort. This is why driving AI adoption now is crucial.
• Engaged employees are 2.6x more likely to support AI being integrated in their workplace. So, it’s wise to use your most engaged employees as your AI advocates to encourage usage across teams.
• Up to 43% of how AI-ready an individual is can be explained by their previous experience with change. Having strong change management processes and good communication can drive AI readiness success.
• 86% of leaders have good opportunities to improve skills, learn and grow during change, while only 64% of individual contributors have this experience. Aim to give everyone the same opportunity to develop AI skills for greater adoption.
• 83% of employees at high-performing organisations say they have opportunities to integrate AI into their work, while only 56% of employees at typical organisations say the same. Giving your staff more chances to utilise AI in their daily work can therefore drive performance.
• High-performing organisations provide far more access to AI tools than typical organisations. So, allowing your staff to use AI tools rather than discouraging them, can provide greater rewards.

These stats show the correlation between how AI change is managed and the positive benefits businesses experience, making your approach critical.

Our top tips for changing AI habits_

1. Lead from the top_

As with any business change, it should start with leadership. Make sure your leadership teams are constantly encouraging AI adoption, in line with your workplace policy, and regularly communicating this to their teams. Moreover, they should be openly using AI themselves.

Another option here is to identify AI champions within your business who will regularly use the tools. They can then share their experiences across the wider business, with a view of encouraging wider adoption.

2. Assign your seats intentionally_

We typically recommend starting with a small number of licences for AI tools while you experiment and identify use cases. When you do this, we recommend you assign seats intentionally.

Ensure members from every team have access to AI, as this will enable you to identify use cases across your core functions for a comprehensive view of the AI impact.

This will also make it easier to encourage adoption in every team, so everyone is bought into the transition.

3. Create a working group_

When beginning to use AI, a working group can give people a chance to share and discuss their experiences. Typically, people will be encouraged to bring their weekly issues and successes to regular sessions.

This encourages people to use AI, so they can contribute to each session, but also allows them to inspire others with their usage. Over time, the entire group will use AI more efficiently, allowing you to gather use cases that can then be shared throughout the business.

We created our own AI working group and saw significant benefits – including 4.2 hours saved per member, per week. We’ve also seen it improve adoption across the business.

4. Encourage experimentation_

It’s difficult to know how AI will best suit your business until you use it. Nobody yet knows everything AI is capable of. That’s why experimentation is crucial to uncovering valuable uses.

Make sure your staff have a safe space to experiment with AI and understand how to use it. This might include giving them time to play around with it in their working day, reducing any taboo around AI or letting them test new tools.

By letting people safely experiment with AI, they can find the best ways for it to drive productivity and inspire creativity, which they can then share widely.

5. Document successful use cases_

As people get comfortable with AI, they should identify helpful ways to use it to complete tasks faster, get high-quality output or overcome internal challenges.

When good use cases are found, they should be documented. Give everyone a chance to share their success stories and add them to a growing bank of use cases.

These can then be circulated throughout the business, so everyone can benefit from proven AI use cases and increase performance.

6. Share external inspiration_

There are plenty of resources out there to help people use AI better. People have dedicated hours to researching AI (so you don’t have to!) and turning their successes in videos, blogs, social media posts and so on.

Spend time looking at what’s available and pinpoint the use cases that are most relevant to your business. You can then pass these onto relevant teams, helping to inspire their AI usage.

We’ve even put together 45 use cases to get you started.

7. Manage expectations_

While AI has significant advantages, it can’t do everything. AI tools tend to perform well with specific tasks, such as content generation and data analysis. However, you’ll find that it can’t do certain tasks well, such as more strategical or technical work.

It also doesn’t have the same skills as human, including empathy, first-hand experience and interpersonal skills. This means it won’t always be suitable.

Even for tasks AI can do, your staff will need to prompt it, sense-check and edit outputs.

Be clear that AI shouldn’t be a replacement for all work and that staff still need to spend time monitoring the output and quality checking. This will prevent standards from slipping.

8. Increase usage gradually_

As we’ve already mentioned, adopting AI can be a significant shift for any business. If you move too fast, you risk confusion, disruption and poor usage that doesn’t bring the intended benefits.

Aim to implement AI slowly. Start by giving a few people access and getting them used to using it for tasks, then gradually scale it across teams.

This will enable the change to happen naturally, encouraging healthy buy-in rather than forcing people to use it.

9. Master prompting_

Being able to prompt AI efficiently is key to getting high-quality outputs. With better outcomes, you’re more likely to improve business performance and gain competitive advantages.

However, prompting is an art. You need to give detailed prompts that clearly set out what you need, give enough context and put AI in the best position to respond.

Encourage your staff to spend time testing different prompt styles, with the aim of uncovering which generate the best answers. They should also share their wins with others, so everyone gets better at prompting.

Our Copilot promptbook contains top tips to master prompting, with example prompts to test out across your business areas.

10. Measure impact_

You’ve implemented AI to improve business performance in some way. So, the best way to encourage adoption is to show the positive impact with cold, hard facts.

Make a conscious effort to monitor the impact of AI as you increase usage. This might include hours saved, return on investment, project outcomes or more qualitative feedback.

Then, share this data with the wider business. This will show them the positive effect AI can have, which will make them more likely to use AI themselves.

11. Tailor_

Many AI tools out there are one-size-fits-all. But every business will implement AI in different ways, depending on their processes, staff, challenges and objectives.

Tailoring AI can fit it better to your specific business needs, delivering bespoke advantages that have a bigger impact on performance.

There are many ways to tailor AI, including:

• Find industry or role-specific tools that have been built for businesses like yours
• Connect AI to your data, allowing it to deliver contextual responses
• Create bespoke AI solutions, using platforms like Copilot Studio

With AI that’s better connected to your business, you can enable users to get good responses without having to spend time prompting it, reducing the barriers to usage.

Getting your business AI-ready_

AI can significantly evolve your business for the better. However, it can only drive results if your organisation is ready for it, with staff who feel encouraged to use it efficiently and creatively.

We know getting the ball rolling with AI can be tricky, especially if your team don’t know much about it. It’s something we’ve had to tackle ourselves. But by simply introducing one working group, we’ve been able to change habits, reduce AI resistance and generate huge outcomes – including reclaiming over 2000 working hours a year.

Download our free AI case study to find out how we scaled AI usage and generated positive results, without anyone needing to be an AI expert first.