Happy 2025 to you! I hope you had some time to recharge over the past few weeks and are starting the new year energized!
I also took some time off to visit family. My husband and I were in London with our college-aged kids to visit my in-laws.
We find that when the kids come home from college on breaks, we often have to compete with their friends to spend time with them. Since we’re often the losers in that situation, we figured out a better option is to “hijack them” and take them out of town with us. We get more time with them and we all get a trip somewhere. It’s a win-win. 😉
Our daughters were in London recently, so they’re familiar with how to navigate and use the tube, but our son has never needed to use the tube independently.
He was frustrated because he didn’t want to visit the same places as the girls, but also wasn’t confident in how to get around on his own. And, if you’ve never been on the tube in central London at a busy time of day, suffice it to say that it can be intimidating.
The situation reminded me of what we do at Denamico helping people learn and incorporate new ‘systems’ into their daily life. This includes teaching them how and why using those systems will make their lives easier.
An analogy we could make in the business world of something that is similarly overwhelming a lot of people today is AI. Most people believe they need to learn it or they’ll be left behind, but they’re not sure where or how to start.
So on our second day in London, we ventured out with his primary goal being to visit some vintage clothing stores, and mine being to have him learn the life skills of how to use public transport in the UK.
Be forewarned if you ever take this on with a young person yourself: make sure you feed them first. Trying to teach anyone anything when they’re hangry is extremely painful.
Once we got past the 8 places that didn’t have his desired tuna sandwich 🥖, and found one that did, he was recharged and ready to take on learning how to use the subway.
This day in London with my son was a bit of a ‘back to basics’ reminder for me.
If you want someone to learn something new, especially something that can seem somewhat overwhelming, it’s significantly easier when they are motivated themselves to learn it.
This was the crux of the discussion during a recent RevOps Champions podcast with Paul Roetzer about AI.
As business leaders, if we believe we must figure out how to leverage AI in order to be competitive, much less remain relevant, how do we help our people to want to learn it?
Paul has some very practical suggestions. One of the best things we can do is to help our teams identify use cases. By holding a simple brainstorming session, we can ask our people to identify which processes are currently the most labor intensive. This gives us a great starting point.
From there, we can prioritize which ones to focus on first, and maybe we pick a pilot project.
With the pilot project, we’ll want to establish some benchmarks, so we can measure what our gains are after the fact.
Paul says, “your main outcomes are going to be productivity, revenue, and profitability.”
Some of those are going to take longer to achieve than others, but understanding that those outcomes are possible will give our teams the context and motivation to want to learn more about using AI themselves.
Identifying use cases and incorporating AI reminds me of a great quote by Seth Godin, “The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting something.”
AI has and will continue to be transformational on so many levels, and the only way to start reaping the benefits is to get started.
Our team has been using AI to a greater or lesser degree for the past year, mostly for writing as well as data manipulation in spreadsheets. And a couple of additional use cases we’ve identified are using AI to help us write case studies, prepare presentation decks, and forecast capacity.
So my challenge to you, whether it’s this month or this year, is how will you get started or continue to incorporate AI into your life?
Cheers,
Kristin