There’s something uncomfortable about being good at your job and suddenly feeling like the beginner in the room.
You know your customers. You can tell when a brief is missing the real problem. You’ve spent years learning which questions to ask. Then someone opens an AI tool, makes something in thirty seconds and you wonder whether you’ve missed an entire chapter.
In my conversation with Dawid Naude on F*ck, I’m Nearly 50!, we talked about what experience brings to AI. Understanding people, reading a situation and knowing what matters are all useful things to arrive with. Learning the tool is only part of the work.
That’s a helpful place for a leader to begin. If you want people to try something unfamiliar, give them a way to use what they already know.
Give people a real task to try
“We need to get across AI” is a fairly enormous item to put on anyone’s to-do list. What would you actually do first?
I’d start with a piece of work that’s small enough to inspect properly. Take a public product description and ask for the questions a new customer might have. Give it a fictional brief and ask what’s missing. Try turning a rough agenda into a meeting with a clear purpose.
Use a tool approved for your workplace and keep confidential material out of the exercise. The point is to learn something useful without creating another problem.
Then look at the answer together. What did it understand? What did it miss? Would you use any of it? An experienced person might immediately spot that the proposed customer question is irrelevant, or that the polished agenda avoids the decision everyone needs to make. That judgement belongs in the conversation.
Make room for the awkward bit
If someone is used to being the person with the answer, asking for help can feel exposing. A leader can make that easier by showing a first attempt, including the parts that didn’t work.
I’d rather hear someone explain why they rejected an answer than watch a demonstration where everything looks perfect. It gives the team something to discuss and makes the checking visible.
Give the experiment some time in the working day, too. If learning only happens after everything else is finished, you’ve made it optional in practice, whatever the presentation said.
For a first team session, choose one task and spend fifteen minutes trying it. Ask everyone to bring back one useful result and one thing they had to correct. Compare the approaches. Decide whether it’s worth another go.
Before you repeat the exercise, ask whether the task itself deserves the effort. Would doing it faster help a customer or colleague? Is it still needed? That’s where the commercial thinking comes in. It’s easy to get excited about what you can make and forget to question why you’re making it.
People need permission to learn, and the work still needs their judgement. Start somewhere small enough for both to happen.
Listen to my conversation with Dawid Naude and find the free episode guide.
For more on helping people work together, read Do you have a common language? If there’s a question about change in your own team, send me a note.