86 | 4 Ways To Train Your Team on AI by Isar Meitis

Are your AI initiatives keeping up with the pace of change in today's business world?

Discover how to effectively train your team on AI to boost productivity, enhance decision-making, and maintain your competitive edge. Whether you're a seasoned tech leader or just starting to explore AI possibilities, this episode is your guide to practical and impactful training methods.

But how can you implement these strategies in a way that really sticks?

In this episode of Leveraging AI, I break down the four fundamental ways to educate your team on AI, complete with pros and cons to help you choose the right approach for your organization. From self-paced online courses to dynamic in-person training sessions, get the insights you need to make informed decisions.

Listen to the full episode and enhance your team’s AI skills by subscribing and sharing this podcast with other C-suite leaders. 

Let's lead the change in how businesses innovate with AI!

About Leveraging AI

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and this is a special episode. In this episode, I'm going to summarize multiple ways in which you can train yourself and the employees of your business or members of your organization. If you're in a professional community or a consortium of multiple companies or a nonprofit, how can you train people in your organization to learn how to leverage AI and use AI in your business, in your organization to generate value and generate business benefits. As you probably know, one of the services that my company Multiplai provides is AI training for business professionals. We do this in four different ways that we're going to review in this episode. And I'm going to share with you for each and every one of those four.Ways, what are the pros, what are the cons so you can decide for yourself, what is the best thing for your business and people in your organization, or just good for you. So you can join those. If we're doing public sessions. But before I dive into those four options, I will start with a type of education that is true for every single organization out there, and that is unstructured, personal, continuous learning, which you can do by curating a list yourself or with other people in your organization of people to follow online. This could be people like me. So you've been listening to this podcast, obviously you already found me, but there are a lot of other people like me that you can follow to learn from, not in a structured way, like a course, but still get a lot of valuable information. I recommend curating a list to follow in three different categories. One is news people who share what's happening like I do once a week with this podcast. So if you've been following this podcast for a while, there's two kinds of episodes, one that is more practical and tactical, and one that's just the weekly news of what's happening. But again, there's a lot of other great podcasts or other people who share AI news. So news is one, The second one is thought leaders, people who talk about AI concepts, ideas, what's happening, what's coming down the pipe. So leaders, CEOs of different AI companies, people from academia, thought leaders in the field and so on. And then the last thing is people who are practitioners, people who can share with you actual use cases and how they're doing them across multiple aspects of business organizations or daily life, and you can find these people in any platform you're on. So whether it's TikTok or LinkedIn or YouTube or Instagram or a podcast, it doesn't really matter. Curate the list, share it with people in your organization and talk about what people learn from different segments that they've listened to. Make it a part of your all hands or on your weekly meetings with your team. Whatever the case may be, Make it a topic so then people will make sure that they actually listen and learn stuff every single week and share it with other people in the organization. So that's an unstructured bonus way that I recommend to everyone. But now let's dive into the four ways you can actually put together structured training for people in your organization and in your business.. The first one I'm going to start with is self paced online courses. They are probably thousands of them right now that cover various aspects of AI. These are available from individuals like me from universities, from big learning organizations that cater to corporations and probably a lot of other shapes and forms of that. The way these look is you sign up for a course. Some of them are free. Some of them are paid and you have a list of lessons and you can go to each lesson whenever you want. Take the whole lesson, take segments of the lesson, come back to it. It is usually broken down into the whole syllabus so you can jump forward in most of them to skip things that you think you already know. In some cases, they include online testing that allows you to evaluate your level of understanding of the material that was taught and so on. In the majority of the cases, they will be video based, meaning there's going to be a recording of an instructor or a voice overdub on top of a PowerPoint presentation or something like this. Plus some hands on exercises that you can do yourself in order to experiment and actually get your hands dirty with using the different tools or concepts that are going to be represented in the course. In addition to all of that, many of these courses or the people who record and create these courses Offer different kinds of office hours or ask me anything sessions once a week, where if you actually want to talk to a person after each lesson or after things you don't understand, or at the end of the course, or whenever you want and join and actually ask questions to a person. So this is how a self paced court look like. Let's talk a little bit about pros and cons. The pros. First of all, these are usually cheaper, so they're not going to require a lot of resources. And if if you want to send multiple people from your organization to take the course, it's going to save you money. The other big benefit is that it's flexible, meaning there is no a specific place in time that everybody has to be to join the course, but people can take it on their free hours. They can take it at lunch. They can take it over dinner. They can listen to some of the lectures while they're jogging at the gym, et cetera, et cetera. So it provides flexibility to your employees of when and where they want to take those lessons. So a lot of really great and important benefits. Now let's talk about the disadvantages. The first disadvantage I'm going to share with you statistics that is risk statistics as of the end of 2023. The percentage of online courses that are completed by people who sign up for them globally is 3%. That means that 97 percent of the people, basically everyone who signs up to online courses do not finish the course. So if your goal is for your employees to learn AI and actually go and apply it, it's probably not going to hit the mark if the vast majority of them are not going to complete the course. Obviously, you can hold some kind of a stick above their heads. or put a dangle, a carrot in front of their faces to increase that percentage. But in general, online self paced courses do not work as far as getting people the whole way. The second problem is that these courses are less engaging, meaning there is no other people to work with. It's not done in a group environment. There is no cohort of other people to interact with and exchange ideas. There is no instructor that can make it more interesting and fun and so on, which is another reason why this is less productive and then less information actually sinks in and less aspect of the content actually gets to you because you're just watching a video. There is no additional interaction. And speaking of no additional interaction or brainstorming with others. There's also no immediate feedback from your instructor. So as I mentioned, some of these courses provide a variation of that where there's open hours. And you can come in and ask questions, but it's not as the lesson is progressing. And it's not directly related to what's happening in the course right now, where if you're in an instructor led session, obviously you can raise your hand, ask a question and get an explanation. The other disadvantage, because you're doing this on your own, is you're not gaining a Other benefits such as the networking impact. So if you're taking a course with other people, then you get to know these people, what industry they're in, what roles they're playing, and there might be synergies with those people in the future beyond just learning from the course itself. And the last disadvantage of most of these courses is most of these courses. Are not updated regularly. There will be updated on whatever cycles, some of them once a year, some of them every six months, maybe even once a quarter. But the AI world is changing so fast that it's a disadvantage where maybe something comes out in the beginning of May and the next time the course is going to get updated is in September, so you're not going to get the latest and greatest information. So biggest benefit, flexibility and price. The biggest disadvantages, probably most likely most of the people are not going to complete it. And even those who do are going to get less of a material, less engagement and less value from the course itself. The second option is online cohort based courses. So first of all, let's describe what this is. This mean a group of people that can be from the same industry, the same company, the same organization, or an open group that is open to the public that your employees can join that happens on Zoom or Teams or a dedicated course platform that has a video conferencing capability to it. This means that there is an instructor that is going to deliver the lectures and the lessons and the tests and the evaluations. And there's going to be a group of people that are listening and working jointly and discussing different issues and raising aspects and giving examples from their teams, from their companies in order to learn together. There's usually hands on exercises that the instructor can provide and give feedback as people are doing them and sharing the results. And as people sharing the results, you can learn from each other and from other people and have they've addressed different problems and how they've solved it with different AI tools progressing in the same pace and in the same lesson as you. Many of these courses include group work where you are divided into groups and some of the people are working together, which then provides even additional capabilities as far as how the course progresses. And in many cases, it's going to be homework, where you can work additionally on your spare time and come back ready either for the next lesson, or some of these courses also provide midweek open hours, open office sessions where you can come and ask questions. Some of these environments, both the self paced and the cohort base provide some kind of a chat interface, whether through slack or through other platform where you can ask questions ongoing and get answers, not just in the open office sessions. So let's talk pros and cons of cohort based courses. Let's talk about the pros first. The first thing is it's an instructor led session. It's a lot more colorful. It's a lot more in depth than self paced courses because the instructor will navigate the course to the needs of the specific group based on the questions that are asked, based on the level of participation, based on the level of understanding. And so You're going to get more value by taking this course. The second thing it's in most cases is going to be always up to date because the instructor, if he's a good instructor or she, they will update the course just before the lesson is delivered, which means you will get up to date information versus a cycle of updates that happens in the self paced courses. You're going to learn a lot more because of the brainstorming that is happening and the exchange that is happening with other people. You're going to learn from what they're doing. You're going to learn from their questions. So they may think of questions you didn't think of, but you're going to learn from that as well, which also makes the course a lot more engaging, which means You are going to stay more focused and probably going to get more out of it. And going back to the disadvantage of the self paced courses, you also get networking opportunity with other people from your industry, other people from other industries, the people that you might be able to collaborate with or exchange value with in the future beyond the course itself. Let's talk about the disadvantages of cohort based courses. The first thing is it costs more money in most cases than taking a self paced course. So from a financial perspective, if you want to do a course for 20 people, it's going to cost you more money than if you would have done a self paced course. The second disadvantage is it's a specific time, meaning it's going to be once a week or twice a week or once every other week. It doesn't matter whatever the setup is, you have to have you and the other people that you want that would join that your employees, et cetera, have to show up at a specific time of day at a specific day to get this training. Now, some of these courses offer either as a default or as an option to have the recordings of the session. So if somebody has to miss a session, they can at least watch the recording. It's not exactly the same as being there and being able to engage and ask questions, but it's better than missing the entire session. The other disadvantage is that in most cases, both this And these self paced courses are generic, meaning they're not going to be specific to your industry, to your use case, to your company. So it's good training, but it's generic training that may or may not be relevant to your industry. That being said, I teach a lot of these courses as private courses, meaning I get hired to teach a specific company or to teach a specific industry. And in those cases, I tailor the course and the examples to the company and the industry to make it as specific as possible. But if you just sign up to an online course, this may not be the case. The same thing happens with the exercises, right? So if you're just taking a general course, whether it's self paced or cohort based, the exercises are going to be generic. They're not going to be specific to your needs, your company, your level, and so on. So that's another disadvantage of these two first types of training that we discussed. And there is no way for you to jump forward. So different than the self paced course, you are going to progress with everybody. Even if there's a segment, you actually know, you cannot skip that segment because you're sitting in a Zoom call with an instructor and you're going to move at the same pace as everybody else. And the flip side of this is If you didn't understand something, the instructor cannot stop and go back and teach you the same thing again and again. Where in the self paced course, you can actually do that. You can go back and watch the lesson again, and take the test again, and do the evaluation again. And so that's another disadvantage of having to continue with the class in a cohort base. As I mentioned, some of these do not work. Offer recordings. And so when I teach the courses, you have the option to purchase the recordings, and then you can go back and review stuff when you're doing your homework or just as a refresher before you're implementing this in your business. So that covers the second type of training, which is cohort based training. Now let's go to the third option. The third option is in person training event. So what is that and how does that look like? So in this particular case, an instructor comes to a location that could be your office, that could be a conference room that you rent for the day or for the two days of that event, this could be in a hotel or a conference center or something like this, and the teaching is done in person, in front of your team, your people, your organization, and usually with group exercises and personalized exercises, usually around topics and categories that are of high interest to this particular group. So they're more tailored. And the way this usually works is it includes multiple use cases that the instructor would cover and then provide exercises. And then we would walk around as people do the exercises. Whether in groups or individuals and can give feedback and help people through the process of solving the different use cases that they are working on. So what are the pros of this kind of method? First of all, it's a lot more engaging and fun than even the core base because you're actually sitting in the same room. Usually you would do some other activities either the night before or during or, at lunch or that evening. If you do this event correctly, it's just a lot more fun and it becomes beyond just the training. It's a team building experience. You go out for dinner, you have a bunch of drinks and then you do the training and then the next day you can do something else in the evening. So it becomes an event and not just a training. So from an engagement and fun perspective, you'll get a much better buy in and higher level of participation and energy from the participants. The other thing is it's a lot more focused. What do I mean by that? You would be removed from your day to day office work. Meaning, everybody who participates will be in person, looking at the instructor, participating in the exercises instead of jumping to do their emails, looking at the other screen or doing whatever else they need to do as part of their business. This means higher level of engagement, better learning and a better outcome overall. If you're hiring the right instructor, this will obviously be up to date because the instructor will create the course for you and your team, meaning in addition to the fact it's going to be up to date, it's going to be tailored to your needs. The level of AI knowledge that you currently have in your company, in your organization, As well as the specific topics in which you think after talking to the instructor and preparing this in advance, you will get the most value by learning. So this becomes an engaging event, working in groups, working as individuals, getting immediate feedback, having fun all together, and working on specific topics that are relevant to you and your team. What are the disadvantages of this kind of event? one disadvantage is there's logistics involved and that logistics means overhead, both in means of time. And in means of money, you need a room. If you can do it in your office, if you have a big enough conference area, the disadvantage of doing it in your office is obviously that you're People may drift to do their day to day work versus just focusing on that one event. But if you do it in an event space, whether it's an hotel or a conference center, you will have to pay for that, set it up in advance, catering and so on, everything that comes with it. And maybe even travel if it's not local to where your office is, or if you want to put people from multiple locations, all in one place for this effort. By the way, a simple solution for this whole logistical thing that then adds significantly less complexity and overhead is to piggyback on an existing event you're already doing. So let's say there's a conference that you're hosting or a conference that your team is going to, you can just add a day at that location. So everybody's already traveling, the hotel's already booked, the car's already rented, And you can now add one extra day. This could be even your own internal event. So your sales team, your North America sales team is getting together once a quarter or once every six months to do brainstorming and planning. Then you can add a day of AI training to that. I've done many of those. And then again, it's just adds another fun, interesting, engaging day to a usually really busy and stressful kind of event of strategic planning. So you gain on all fronts. But going back to the disadvantages, in addition to the overhead of the logistical issues that I give you an idea on how it can be solved, it's obviously in a specific time, meaning it's not flexible. And some of the exercises might be still generic because you can tailor everything all the time to the needs of your specific organization. Overall, great experience, much better learning, much more fun, and it's very much condensed. So from the content perspective, if you do a day and a half, you can probably fit whatever you do in a full course of eight hours stretch over four weeks of two hour sessions. But you can do this face to face all at once in a day and a half and get a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience and a lot of hands on in a very short amount of time while working with your team that you may not get other opportunities to do. And then the last option is a training and hackathon combination. So those of you who don't know what a hackathon is, the hackathon is when you get a group of people together to build a prototype of something. And when it comes to AI implementation, what this means is taking actual company slash organization slash community use cases, things that are going to be valuable and applicable to everybody in that group, or most of the people in that group, and actually build a working product prototype. So in addition to learning how to use different tools and learning different use cases, you end up with an automation. You end up with a GPT. You end up with a prompt library. You end up with a process that can help you solve a Monday morning problem. That is a bottleneck in your business or in your organization at that point. So how does a day like this or a couple of days like this look like? It usually starts with a set of training similar to what we discussed in the previous option. So you do a first day of training just to get everybody to a basic level where they can actually do the hackathon. This is not necessary if your team is in a reasonable or above level in using AI and AI tools, you can skip that first day of training. But if you, but I would highly recommend if you find somebody to do this, verify that really the people that are coming to this event are at the necessary level. And if not, Just as I said, add a few hours of basic training and hands on experimentation before you do the hackathon. The hackathon itself, you prepare several different use cases, as I mentioned, that are relevant to your company, to your industry, to your organization, and then different groups within the hackathon, each group solves For a different problem that you're trying to solve with the assistance and the guidance and the mentorship from the instructor that rotates between the different groups. So let's talk about the pros and cons of this kind of method. The benefits are all the benefits of the in person event we talked about before that it's it's a lot more engaging and it's a lot more fun and it gets the team together and it's team building experience and so on. But in addition, you get a lot deeper experimentation because it's not generic exercises. It's actually things that you're going to use. And at the end of the day, you have several different prototypes that your company can actually use and generate immediate ROI in time savings or additional revenue or the combination off both as soon as the event is over versus we finished learning. And now you have to figure out what you're going to do. As far as implementation. The disadvantage is everything we talked about in the in person event, meaning the overhead and so on. And the other disadvantage, as I mentioned, is that it requires more time than a regular face to face event, because usually you will need to do the preliminary training and only then hackathon. So let's do a quick recap and then I'll tell you what I've learned by doing all of the above for people that I've been training in the past year. Self paced courses, cohort based courses online with a live instructor, in person training event with your team in a specific location, or an in person event that includes training plus hackathons. So these are the four different options. The very clear winner is the training and the hackathon. I personally love those because people are always extremely engaged. We always create this as a contest between the different teams and there's prizes involved that people can win. And this could be anything. This could be a PTO. This could be dinner. This could be dinner with a CEO. This could be whatever you want to put as far as a trophy, but it makes it more engaging, more fun. And as I mentioned, the biggest benefit is that it's a hands on experimentation with actual use cases of your actual business or industry organization with immediate ROI because the tools that you're going to create can be used by the people who created them and everybody else in the relevant departments immediately after the session is over over. So all of these are just food for thought for you on the different kinds of training that are available today that you can deliver to your organization. If you are interested in something like this for yourself or for your company, please contact me. No commitment, no string attached. You don't have to pay me anything. I will gladly share with you what does it look like and how to set it up and what are the different options I've done. As I mentioned, multiple of each and every one of these across multiple industries, different size of organizations and so on. So these can be tailored to various needs. The easiest way to do this. Is either send me an email at isar@Multiplai.ai and Multiplai is spelled with an AI in the end instead of Y or just find your LinkedIn ISAR Metis, M-E-I-T-I-S. I'm the only Isar Meitis on LinkedIn, so if you found an Isar Meitis on LinkedIn, that's me. And if you're watching this podcast, you'll be able to see I have the same kind of, image. My profile image on LinkedIn looks the same as the cover of the podcast. So you can be certain that you're actually talking to me. So the final really important thing that I want to say is regardless of who you do the training with, and regardless of what type of training you pick, do it. Make sure that your organization is providing AI training for the relevant people, preferably everybody, but then some of it needs to be external. And then some of it can be done in house. But the difference in results between the 80 percent of companies right now that do very little or nothing with AI to the 10 percent above that, and definitely to the top 10 percent and definitely to the top 1 percent are very dramatic. Like companies are saving hundreds of hours every single month by using AI versus not using AI. And the way to accelerate that process is with this kind of structured, focused training on the things that your company and your personnel needs. I hope you found this valuable. This is me just sharing what I'm learning, delivering these types of training regularly to multiple people in multiple organizations. Next week, we will be back with a regular interview episode, diving into fascinating topics and specific use cases. And obviously over the weekend, we are going to have the regular AI news. If you find this episode and generally this podcast helpful, I would really appreciate it. If you, a) give us a review On your favorite podcasting platform. So pull up your phone right now, unless you're driving. Don't do that if you're driving, but if you're not driving, put up your phone right now and rate this podcast on your platform. And in addition, there's always a share button, click on the share button and share it with other people that you think can benefit from it. This could be on your LinkedIn profile, on a WhatsApp message, or however else you communicate with people, but you can help other people learn this really critical topic of AI by sharing this podcast. In addition, I will be really grateful if you do that. And until next time have an incredible week.