A mindful approach to growing employees with AI
Raising awareness about frontier, current, and impactful issues such as AI is critical if we are not to get overwhelmed by technology or fall behind in the innovation race and consequently lose the ability to compete effectively in the marketplace.
Manni Sipre is an Italian company specializing in the processing and marketing of pre-processed steels for metal structures, components and structural systems for various sectors, including construction, infrastructure and industry. The company offers services such as cutting, drilling and welding of steel profiles, providing solutions tailored to customers' needs.
Innovation is central to Manni Sipre's strategy. For years, the company has been investing in advanced technologies to improve the efficiency of production processes and reduce environmental impact. One of the company's goals is to promote digitization and automation in its operations to give greater precision and efficiency to production.
Successful implementation of AI depends on people
This is precisely why Manni Sipre asked us at Upskill 4.0 to develop a new training format toincrease its employees' awareness of cutting-edge issues, such asAI and innovation design methodologies, in order to understand how to manage innovation.
Artificial intelligence is transforming the world of work, so investing in training is a crucial step that companies should start taking today. According to the latest survey by the World Economic Forum on the future of work, within the next five years employers expect AI advances to reshape a substantial number of jobs, potentially affecting up to 40 percent of total global work hours.
As the capabilities of this transformative technology continue to evolve, organizations are wondering how to use GenAI to increase workforce tasks and productivity and what actions to take to harness its full potential.
But the successful implementation of AI depends on people as much as the technology itself. Workers must understand, trust and adopt it. This requires not only training and support, but also a cultural change within the organization to embrace new ways of working.
The first step is certainly to raise workers' awareness of the possibilities offered by AI to improve productivity, reduce repetitive tasks, and enable them to direct their work to higher value-added activities.
The path we designed for Manni Sipre was based on three levers.
- In the first part, we focused on basic theoretical training on AI to introduce the technology and its evolution over time and understand the impact it can generate in companies, the production and work system.
- The second phase was devoted to theoretical training on innovation process management and change management in the company.
- Finally, we moved on to the practical component on AI through introductory workshops on Python, Web scraping, and machine learning models.
For companies that do not want to fall behind in the innovation race, experimenting with the potential of generative artificial intelligence can be a competitive advantage over their competitors in the medium term. To consciously adopt technology to support the work and the human component, directly involving their employees in an approach path on artificial intelligence and innovation management is the right strategy to introduce a choral change that is not perceived as imposed, but shared.
Bibliography
Leveraging Generative AI for Job Augmentation and Workforce Productivity: Scenarios, Case Studies, and a Framework for Action., World Economic Forum, 2024.
