Diffusing AI into your organization

I have been trying to diffuse AI into Ozonetel for the last few months. I have also been discussing with Nutan Chokkareddy and his approach to AI agents and how he has been diffusing AI into different organizations. Since I also mentor multiple startups, I have been discussing with those startups how they are looking at diffusing AI. One clear indication that is emerging is that, although the AI hype is present, diffusing AI into your organization so that employees can use it in such a way that it helps your organization is not easy. Giving a Claude code or ChatGPT subscription is not enough.

There are mainly two roadblocks I have observed.

First, employees are hesitant about using AI. They are afraid of AI taking over their jobs, and who can blame them with every news article claiming that AI will come for their jobs? That jobs can be replaced by a single skills markdown file, and there are news reports of layoffs every other day from major corporations attributing AI to the cause (though it is not the actual case).

Second, even for the employees who want to use AI, they are stuck. They do not know how to prompt or what to ask the AI. They have not yet made the transition into thinking of it as if they have a worker at their disposal. They prompt basic things like “how can you help me?” or “get me some insights.” They do not actually think of it as a personal assistant.

Even after trying for months, I can say that the marketing team at Ozonetel is the one team that has been able to diffuse AI at a very high level. However, I had to work very closely with them, convincing them and showing them the advantages before they started using it. Even now, I do not know how many of them are using it because I am forcing them to do so. :)

The development team has adapted to AI quite well. I had to personally push for it, and some leaders took up the task and were able to diffuse AI effectively. I am now moving on to the support team and the customer success team. The simple fact is that this year, the main focus for most organizations will be diffusing AI. In this regard, Nutan’s company, personaas.ai, has been doing a good job.

What has helped me in diffusing AI at Ozonetel is that I have been able to track the AI usage of every employee and provide actual feedback on how they are using AI and what mistakes they are making. The personaas.ai team has introduced a concept called “thinking minutes,” where we can see the actual usage of AI mapped to key performance indicators. This has helped me track AI diffusion. I actually know which employee uses AI best and how its mapping to their KPIs. It is a slow process right now, but I believe every organization in the future will certainly have these kinds of dashboards. What also helps is that Personaas team provides live support where their engineers jump in when the employees are stuck in using AI.

Nutan is working only with a few select companies to start with till he perfects the process. You can reach out to him if you wanna try it out for your organization. This will be useful if you have more than 50 employees.