How to prepare your SME to embrace AI and best leverage its benefits

The 2024 Work Trend Index, a joint report from Microsoft and LinkedIn, looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape work and the labour market broadly. 

Reviewing the data from this report, a surprising theme emerges: when it comes to using AI to get work done, employees are outpacing the companies that employ them — bringing their own AI to work. And among small and medium-sized businesses or enterprises (SMEs), the number of employees engaging in “Bring Your Own AI” (BYOAI) is even higher.

Here are some key insights from the Work Trend Index report, as well as the actions you can take to prepare your organisation for AI and better leverage its benefits so you can maintain your competitive edge: 

Leaders need to catch up with AI implementation

SME employees are taking things into their own hands and keeping AI use in the workplace under wraps with 80% of them bringing their own AI tools to work. And yet, 49% are reluctant to admit using AI on their most important tasks.

The gap between vision and reality highlights an opportunity for business leaders to build a comprehensive AI strategy for their business — one that results in more time to focus on customers, products and services. 

SMEs see AI as a competitive advantage

79% of SME employees believe that AI skills will provide them with more job opportunities; providing training and driving AI adoption is key to keeping employees and attracting new talent.

Employees and leaders agree: upskilling on AI is key. 

The path forward for SMEs and AI

The opportunity for SME leaders is to channel employee enthusiasm for AI into business transformation.

This plan will look different for each business, but here’s how to get started:

1. Identify a business problem and then apply AI

There are efficiency gains to be had across functions — the key is to pick the right process. To make this easier, identify employees who are enthusiastic about AI, form them into a small group, and use them as your AI champions.

Once you’ve chosen a process, make sure you can track its impact. For example, if you’re applying it to customer service, track how much faster calls are handled and how that success affects other parts of your operation.

2. Integrate AI tools across your organisation

Use AI within your existing infrastructure to enable it to deliver personalised, relevant and actionable responses.

 To best manage policies and practices for data protection and privacy, choose AI tools that can be easily used with existing security measures in your business’s infrastructure.

And do a quick privacy audit before rollout begins to make sure your data is labelled properly so only those who should have eyes on a file get access.

3. Take a top-down, bottom-up approach

Going from experimentation to transformation requires engagement throughout the organisation. Because SME employees tend to have a closer relationship with their leadership, you need to ensure that your plan aligns with the vision you have already promoted. It should contain a clear, guided process that everyone can follow to activate AI for their teams and in their everyday work.

Your AI champions can help here, promoting your plan, ensuring that deployments go smoothly, and encouraging employees to develop their AI aptitude so they can eventually use AI more creatively.

You will want to widely deploy AI across functions and various roles so employees can share insights and learn from each other. 

4. Prioritise training

Even AI power users cannot do it on their own — they need to receive ongoing training, both on universal tasks and on uses more tailored to their role and function.

There are many AI training and implementation resources readily available online that can help SMEs work successfully with AI. For instance, the AI courses in LinkedIn Learning and the Microsoft Copilot Scenario Library, which contains guided examples on how to use AI in specific workflows.

But online training is only half the battle. Group training is also essential. SMEs have an advantage here because these discussions can cover AI’s effects across large swathes of the business. They will also help you identify those enthusiastic employees you will be turning into your AI champions.

Get started with AI

• Check out Microsoft’s list of AI resources that can help you build a foundation of knowledge about the technology and formulate the right plan to incorporate it in your business. 
• For the latest research insights on the future of work and generative AI, visit Microsoft’s WorkLab. 

For more information on how you can harness the power of AI to boost your SME’s business operations, click here.

This article was sponsored by Microsoft SA.