My lawyer friend recently mentioned that she’d asked her workplace, a software company, to have someone tell her how to use AI in her job. This was after her company had already held group trainings, including a company retreat where AI usage had been the focus. But when all the training was done, she still had a job to do and was unsure about where and how to apply AI.
Asking around, I’ve begun to hear similar stories. Tons of workers have been through some kind of AI training, but haven’t been able to integrate AI into their working lives effectively.
The research suggests my friends are hardly alone. According to BCG’s 2026 AI at Work survey, 72% of workers say the skills expected in their jobs have already shifted because of AI, but only 36% believe they’ve received adequate upskilling. “While getting proper training and support from leaders is a strong driver of AI’s potential, it remains one of the biggest unmet needs.”
So, how can we better educate workers of all stripes so that AI usage sticks?
The Need for Protected Learning Time
Sometimes the trainings aren’t tailored enough to a specific person’s role on the team. A marketing employee might have diligently attended a workshop where he learned all about how to prompt correctly to write copy — but missed out on how AI could help with the project management that is his main task.
Or perhaps he did read a headline about how he could link AI to the main social media post-tracking software she uses. He sent herself a copy of the link, meaning to look it up later, but never got around to it, too inundated with her usual duties.
Time is, in fact, one of the biggest barriers to workplace learning. Gallup found that 89% of CHROs cite time away from job responsibilities as their organization’s biggest obstacle to employee development.
One solution is to have an in-house person on hand whose job it is to field questions about AI. A tech executive shared how her company has that person and others at the company who have become skilled in AI lead a workshop with ample time to ask questions about practical applications, along with office hours where participants can drop in and ask questions that come up as they give it a try.
That approach dovetails with findings from BCG, which recommends that organizations provide employees with protected time to learn and experiment with AI rather than expecting them to squeeze that learning into already full workdays. Organizations leading in AI are four times more likely than laggards to have structured AI-learning programs and protected learning time.
In other words, perhaps the answer isn’t another two-hour presentation about AI. Employees may need time to sit down with someone who understands the technology and ask a much more mundane question: How can I use this to do my actual job?
Employee Incentives
If you provide all the training in the world and AI implementation still isn’t taking place, what’s the next step?
And that brings up one final possibility: incentives.
That could mean contests for the best new AI use case, recognition in an employee newsletter, or incorporating demonstrated AI skills into professional-development and performance goals. But there’s an important caveat. Simply tying compensation or promotions to how often someone opens an AI tool could produce exactly the wrong behavior.
The incentive, then, shouldn’t be use more AI. It should be find ways to use AI that make your work better, and share what you’ve learned.
Final Thoughts
The AI Revolution remains somewhat chaotic, full of promise and potential, but still uncertainty about what’s actually working. It starts at the ground level, with employees at their desks, implementing these new tools effectively and enthusiastically. To make that happen, consider giving employees training specific enough to apply to their jobs, time to experiment with what they’ve learned, people they can turn to when they get stuck, and a reason to keep going once the training session ends.
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