GenAI is a Massive Career Accelerant
7 recommendations to retain your top talent
Can you hear that? Every ambitious and talented employee in your organization is running to the Gen AI career rocket. They know that Gen AI is the best and fastest career accelerator that has ever existed.
Because of the pace of Gen AI change and the massive associated talent shortage, battlefield promotions are happening everywhere. We have seen people get promoted from manager to director to VP. We know several who are looking to leave for a better position after completing their first Gen AI project. Executives at digital native firms like Wayfair and others have told us that it is very hard to keep Gen AI talent longer than 18 months or 2 years.
We recommend seven steps
Acknowledge the reality. Yes we know it’s unfair. Yes this opportunity didn’t exist when you were building your career. Yes that person’s compensation plan is rich. Yes there is jealousy and resentment in parts of your organization. But, you also know the reality. Top talent with go to the best opportunity — full stop. Bubbles always find a way to the top of the water line. The only business questions is whether the top Gen AI talent will be on your team or your competitors
Create “safe lanes” or “walled gardens” for the Gen AI early adopters and enthusiasts in your organization to experiment and learn. Outright bans of ChatGPT are useless. Employees are telling us they use it it for work at home and then email results to their work email. A better approach is to create clear boundaries, something like: feel free to use ChatGPT work with non company info or with any company info that is on our public website, but if you put in confidential information you will be fired on the spot. Don’t stunt the Gen AI energy in your org. Rosemary Brisco from our GAI Insights community posted a sample employee use policy.
Support and foster cross functional GenAI “Learning Labs” by function, business problem/opportunity or division. We continually say that learning Gen AI is like swimming. It can’t be learned via a book or Youtube video. It’s experiential. To learn to swim, you initially have a swim coach and have multiple learning sessions over several weeks. You need time to mentally and physically acclimate to the water environment and to learn skills. Learning GenAI is no different for individuals, teams and companies. Weekly “learning labs” (we like 1 hour meetings) are environments where the Gen AI early adopters share case studies and help each other learn. We know of large firm that is having Gen AI intro class for ALL of its employees.
Create multiple levels of ways to contribute. Not everyone has the same excitement level and time. Create participation levels for all levels
Define “mini GenAI milestones” every 15 to 30 days to foster real examples using your own data, your company language, and your business needs. These tools are SO powerful and easy to use that much can be done in 15 days. One zero risk example is taking, say, 500 PDFs about technical support and using an LLM to access.
Use their excitement and energy to accelerate Gen AI learning and adoption for the rest of the organization. For example “Adopt a Gen AI learning buddy.”
Personally spend 5 hours using GenAI. You would never hire an employee or let them influence capital allocation if they never used the internet. The same is true for Gen AI. It’s simply too transformational and important. Every executive needs to spend 5 hours (ideally over 2-5 weeks) learning basic Gen AI and finding their own “wow” moments.
McKinsey recently released a report on the future of AI in the workforce. They estimate that 12M people will change careers.
Learn about 20 enterprise Gen AI use cases at Generative AI World Conference Sep 12-13 in Boston. This event has a lot of momentum.
Onward,
Paul