How to Integrate AI into a Business When Its Employees Lack the Skills

According to a recent Deloitte survey, 57% of American small businesses are investing in AI, up from 36% in 2023. Despite this surge, small businesses frequently encounter a major roadblock in the form of an untrained staff that is ill-equipped to handle this new technology.

With fewer employees and less resources to train them, small businesses are at a major disadvantage against their larger, better-equipped rivals. Fortunately, there are ways for these companies to successfully integrate AI into their operations, even when their staff lacks the required knowledge.

The AI Implementation Process

How can businesses integrate AI when their employees are unprepared? Typically, they either turn to an outside partner or build expertise within the company.

For businesses that choose to upskill on their own, there are two paths. The first we’ve often seen is businesses hiring a full-time leader, with titles like “VP of AI” or “Chief AI Officer,” or consulting firms specializing in AI strategy. The second (and often less utilized method) is to train and upskill existing employees. Training in-house can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, with employees having to grasp a complex new technology on top of their preexisting responsibilities.

Whether a company is working with an internal employee or an external partner, the ideal implementation procedure is similar. It begins with an examination of the business’s day-to-day operations and workflows in order to identify where there are opportunities to integrate AI. With each process, the expert looks at the data quality and evaluates it step by step. Based on the collective information gathered, workflows need to be reevaluated to see where AI makes sense in current processes or where current processes can be reinvented with AI as the foundation.

Regardless of where a business is starting, an open mind is the critical ingredient. A business doesn’t need to know every granular detail about the technology in order to start. Building a foundation of enablement for employees requires an understanding of the current state, the impacts of efficiency or value creation the business is looking to make, and where AI can reasonably impact the process. A good framework for initial education is showing employees the AI’s capabilities and then the new processes, the data it’s making its decisions from, and whether it can successfully make decisions on its own or needs a person involved. Any business can have a working knowledge of AI when it’s explained in that simple way.

The Most Common Challenges

While AI adoption has a multitude of challenges, there are two that are especially frequent. The first is when leadership is pressuring a business to rush the AI integration process. With so many businesses now using AI, leaders are often afraid that if they don’t jump onboard right away, they’ll be left in the dust.

In the face of this pressure, it’s important for experts to stay measured and warn leadership of any possible pitfall. If a business rushes to implement AI without looking at the process, the end result will likely suffer, resulting in not only a waste of time and money but also potential harm to its operations.

The second challenge is the data. The good news is that as long as the data exists, even if the quality isn’t good, businesses can often form a path to get it AI-ready. They can fill in the gaps and build a robust data quality framework. While this process takes time and patience, it’s necessary to build a successful AI system. If a business builds AI on top of poor data, the results will likely be flawed, and teams will lose trust in the process.

The data challenge only becomes hard to solve if the data doesn’t exist. If a business wants an AI agent to make predictions, but there’s no data on which to base them, then it would need external data sources or synthetic data to potentially fill in the gaps. If such sources are unavailable, then those responsibilities are best left to people.

How to Approach the Least Prepared Businesses

When a business is especially unskilled in AI, experts should keep their explanations simple and not go too far down the technology rabbit hole. They should start with basic definitions of common terms like agent, context, and MCP. By defining these words with clear language, experts can help businesses understand AI without being too technical.

Upskilling starts from the top down. We’ve often heard executives object to understanding how AI really works, saying it’s either too technical or too low-level for them to need to understand. However, this often leads to misaligned expectations with the impact AI can really have, as well as misalignment in its limitations. AI is injecting a whole new level of technology autonomy into businesses. Wouldn’t you want to understand the background and access of new employees joining your business?

Understanding AI also enables leaders and employees alike to identify patterns of usage within siloed functions at the company. AI uses data across so many departments that experts often wind up talking to all of them. They’re able to find connections like “This is where one department’s workflow ties into another’s workflow, and this is how their processes are similar. We only need to build one solution that fixes both departments’ problems.”

Businesses don’t often notice these correlations before undergoing AI implementation. Once that process begins, they start seeing all the similarities among their departments’ operations. So, in addition to optimizing a company’s workflows, AI opens the conversation for more intercompany collaboration.

How Employees Can Become Experts

A lot of employees are waiting for their organizations to tell them how to think about AI. But, when dealing with technology that’s causing a tremendous cultural shift, employees have a responsibility to stay informed. Resources like AI newsletters are available to break down hard-to-understand concepts and keep readers up to speed on all the latest developments.

This mindset shift is the fundamental factor for deciding who will thrive in this new era. These employees aren’t approaching AI with a fear of “This is going to replace me” or “This is going to make my job useless.” Instead, they’re asking themselves, “How can I use this technology to accelerate the value I’m providing and open new horizons for me?”

A proactive, open-minded approach towards AI will ultimately have a positive impact on both employees and their businesses. Employees who stay informed and keep a positive attitude can become thought leaders and advocate for AI in their jobs. And, when their companies decide to implement AI, these individuals are the ones we see leading the transition.

The Next Steps

Even when a business has successfully integrated AI into its operations, that’s not the end of the story. Businesses should consistently monitor their programs to ensure they’re running smoothly and providing accurate results and the impact they desire.

With AI constantly evolving, businesses should also determine how to incorporate the latest advance into their programs. Only by constantly staying informed can businesses stay ahead of the curve and become true AI leaders.