There is a conversation happening in leadership meetings everywhere right now: What are we doing to get our people ready for AI?

The obvious answer is training. Get people into a Copilot workshop. Teach them how to prompt. Create an acceptable-use policy. Find the employees who are interested in AI and give them more advanced training.

Those aren’t bad ideas. But I think we’re answering the question too quickly.

Imagine we do all of that successfully. Six months from now, everyone understands AI and knows how to use the tools. Then they go back to essentially the same jobs, with the same responsibilities, processes and expectations they had before.

What did we really change?

If AI allows someone to complete in twenty minutes what used to take two hours, the important question isn’t how they saved an hour and forty minutes. It’s what you want them doing with the time you just gave back?

That’s why I don’t think AI readiness is primarily a training problem. It’s an org design problem.

Imagine an operations coordinator who spends part of the week updating project schedules, preparing status reports, following up with vendors, entering information into different systems, documenting meetings and chasing down missing information.

You could train that person on AI, and they’d probably find ways to save some time. AI could help draft emails, summarize meetings and create a first draft of a report.

But I’d go further.

I’d sit down with the employee and their manager and map the actual job. Maybe we discover that the weekly status report requires two hours of gathering information from different places, figuring out what changed and turning it into something management can use.

Now we can start pulling that process apart.

Could AI gather the information and prepare the first draft? Sure, but the coordinator still needs to validate the information, understand what’s important and determine what needs someone’s attention.

We’ve changed the work. The coordinator is spending less time assembling information and more time evaluating it.

Now comes the good part: What should this person do with the time we gave back?

Maybe they can support more projects. Maybe they spend more time communicating with customers. Maybe project managers are doing administrative work that can move to this role. Maybe the coordinator can start identifying project risks instead of simply documenting project status.

There isn’t one correct answer because the answer depends on what your business needs.

Instead of telling an employee, “We need you to learn Copilot,” imagine telling them, “We’re trying to remove five hours of administrative work from your week because we need you spending more time managing our vendor relationships.”

Now there’s a reason to learn the technology, and we know what skills we need to develop next.

Here’s something you can do with your leadership team this week.

Print your org chart and pick one department. Don’t try to do the entire company.

Choose one role and spend ten minutes answering four questions:

Then pick one task and test it.

Don’t create a six-month AI transformation plan. Take something that currently consumes two hours and see if you can get it to thirty minutes without sacrificing quality. Measure what actually happens.

You may save three hours. You may save twenty minutes. You may discover AI isn’t very good at that particular task. All three outcomes teach you something.

Then move to the next role.

Eventually you’re going to find roles where 20%, 30% or even more of the work can change. That doesn’t automatically mean you need fewer people. It means you need to decide whether those people can create more value doing something else.

We’re often doing it backward. We’re training people on AI and hoping they’ll figure out how their jobs should change. Before you schedule another AI training session, put your org chart on the table and spend ten minutes on one role.

You may find that your biggest AI skills gap isn’t knowing how to use AI. It’s knowing what you want your people doing once they do.

Until next week,

—Jared

Text Me: 314.806.3912

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