TRAINING DAYS
Columnist Amanda Jeffs suggests we try giving the AI employee many of us have hired a decent job description.
PHOTO DEBORAH DE GRAAF
Imagine a consultant in the Mount. Let’s call her Kelly. She’s good at her job, and about six months ago, she signed up for one of the big AI tools, the way you’d sign up for a gym in January. She uses it every day now, but admits she’s not sure it’s changed her work life much. Its writing is generic, and fixing it takes as long as it would have to start from scratch.
The thing is, she hasn’t been let down by AI. She’s hired a new employee and never onboarded them. There’s no manual, no brief, no clear sense of the job.
I hear a version of this constantly. Clients ask me how AI can help them, and I ask what they do every day. Half the time, they can’t break it down. There aren’t any workflows or units of work, there isn’t a business plan or goals. You can’t train a new hire with zero structure.
That’s where I start with a lot of founders, before we add AI. I call it a leadership and clarity problem. You wouldn’t sit a new intern (let’s call her Chloe) at an empty desk, tell her to go for it and walk away. Chloe would just sit there, useless through no fault of her own. That’s most people’s experience of AI.
Here at home, more than eight in 10 businesses already use AI. Barely one in 10 has a written policy for it, and nearly one in five is using it without anybody in charge. That gap has nothing to do with budget or which tool they’ve picked. It comes down to whether anyone has bothered to explain, clearly, what they actually want.
You can’t manage what you can’t describe. If your business plan lives entirely in your head, good luck training Chloe or anyone else to do the job well.
Success also means drawing a line around what AI shouldn’t touch. In my own business, I have three simple categories: things I keep to myself, things I do alongside AI, and things I hand over completely. For example, AI will never send an email without me checking it first. Rules like that belong in an actual written policy.
Last year, New Zealand released Responsible AI Guidance alongside its national AI strategy, and the reassuring thing is that a workable policy can be one page, not a legal document. Used well, I think it’s the biggest advantage a business can have right now, but you have to learn how to do it properly first – then you’ll understand what the fuss is about.
Back at the café, Kelly doesn’t need a better tool. She needs to sit Chloe down, tell her what her job actually is, and see what happens next.
Amanda Jeffs is the founder of SHE IS AI, a platform that helps women lead the conversation on AI. Her human- readiness arm, SHE IS SOL, launches on October 1.