I gave a short talk at TEDxNewy last month on a belief of mine: fluency in artificial intelligence (AI) should be a standard part of workplace training, the same way learning Excel or Word once was.
Most conversations about AI in business jump straight to software. In my experience, that’s the wrong end of the problem. I spend most of my week talking with people inside Hunter businesses, including builders, engineers, project managers, surveyors and accountants, and the same picture comes up again and again. Business owners know AI matters. Their teams are curious about it. But very few people feel confident about where to start, and much of what they read about AI only makes it seem more complicated.
That gap matters in a region like ours. The Hunter runs on trades, engineering and professional services, where reputations are local and mistakes cost real money. The reality is that whether a business has formally adopted AI or not, people are already using it. Someone is pasting information into a free chatbot account right now without really knowing where that information goes, how reliable the answer is, or whether they should be using the tool for that task in the first place.
That’s why I think the first step has very little to do with software. It starts with giving people a basic understanding of what AI actually is, what it’s good at, what it’s bad at, and where human judgement still needs to take over. Teams should also know what information they can and can’t put into these tools. Once people understand what they’re working with, much of the fear tends to disappear.
From there, keep it practical. Put some basic rules around AI use so everyone knows the boundaries. Use business-managed accounts rather than personal ones where possible. Then choose one small, repetitive task and start there. It could be comparing two documents, reformatting a tender, producing a first draft, checking a spreadsheet or summarising a long set of notes. The important part is not trying to automate everything at once.
And one rule should hold throughout: judgement and taste stay human. AI is not there to price a job, approve a design or make a decision that someone should be accountable for. Its value is often in the manual work around those decisions: the cross-checking, the reformatting, the first drafts and the document admin sitting between a skilled person and the work they’re actually paid to do.
The best results are usually not dramatic. A payroll check that used to take hours might take minutes. A tender document that used to consume half a day can be reformatted quickly. Someone spends less time searching through files or rewriting the same information in a different format. None of those things make for a particularly exciting AI headline, but added together they can give a team hours back every week.
For most Hunter businesses, that’s probably where the opportunity is. They don’t need to become AI companies, and they don’t necessarily need a dedicated AI person. They need their existing people to understand the technology well enough to use it safely, question its output and recognise where it can genuinely make their work easier.
That’s the whole belief, really. Treat AI fluency like any other workplace skill. Teach people how to use it, set some clear boundaries, and start somewhere small and useful. The technology becomes a lot less intimidating once people actually understand what they’re dealing with.
IMAGE | Ryan Lynch
