By Doug Woolley, Vice President Sales Southern Africa and Director Dell Technologies South Africa

At Dell Technologies, we recognise that AI fluency is about understanding when, where and how to use AI tools safely and responsibly. But it’s a challenge for organisations to ensure their people grasp these concepts in their work. As AI – including Generative AI (GenAI) – rapidly influences how organisations operate, it’s crucial that you help your workforce gain the skills needed in this fast-paced and increasingly digital world.

 GenAI will radically transform how your people work. McKinsey research shows that GenAI could enable automation of up to 70% of business activities across almost all occupations between now and 2030. And while GenAI may be in the nascent stages of development and usage, it will only get more intelligent and pervasive.

 Right now, GenAI is embedded in numerous everyday tools like email, word processing applications and meeting software. GenAI will continue to expand into additional tools and workflows, further transforming our work habits and supercharging productivity.

 And this comes as no surprise to many. In fact, 91% of South African respondents to Dell Technologies’ recent Innovation Catalysts study agree that AI and GenAI will significantly transform their industry. We believe organisations that harness the ingenuity and creativity of their people – powered by the right AI and data – will be better positioned for success. While there may not be a single answer on how to successfully introduce GenAI in an organisation, here are some best practices to follow: 

·       Understand and communicate how AI and GenAI are linked to your organisation’s strategic objectives. As with any change, it’s important to reinforce the 'why' to your team. Help them see how it can enhance their experience. What are the ways that the technology can augment their work? What are the ways that the technology can improve their experience or productivity? It’s important to help people see the advantages and how GenAI helps the organisation achieve its goals. An even better approach is to identify two or three high-impact applications to use widely, bringing your team along by showing them the progress and impact.

·       Encourage experimentation. The agility and desire to learn is one of the most important ways to drive innovation in the next five years. AI and GenAI can certainly provide some assistance here; however, a culture of experimentation is foundational to implementing these and other new technologies to their fullest potential. Knowing when, where and how to use AI tools safely and responsibly is not enough. Your team needs the combination of AI fluency alongside innate human qualities like creativity, expertise and critical thinking to find new approaches to problem solving. And this becomes even more important when you consider that 61% of local decision makers agreed in the Innovation Catalysts study that many of the jobs and skills needed in 2030 are yet to emerge. It’s important to instil confidence in your people that they can deal with ambiguity, change and failure. This includes being clear about what is known and still not known or even acknowledging learnings from an initiative that didn’t go as fully planned.

·       Provide AI-optimised, intuitive, collaborative and secure technology. With your culture as a foundation, put the right technology in place to rethink how work gets done now and in the future. A workforce’s ability to enhance its efficiency and foster innovation hinges on having the necessary tools for safe collaboration and productivity. The tools that you deploy need to be the right fit for the task at hand. For example, giving your team GenAI-ready devices with the compute, memory and storage to handle heavy AI development and deployment. Or offering the latest hardware and software that gives your team the automation needed within everyday processes and tasks.

·       Empower your workforce with skills and guidelines. You need to not only educate your team on the technology itself, but also offer clear guidelines on how to use it responsibly. It’s imperative that you keep communication consistent and offer ongoing training as the tools and use cases for them evolve. If rolled out successfully, GenAI offers the potential to augment the employee work experience.

And 78% of South African decision makers agreed in the Innovation Catalysts study that machines will augment our capabilities, taking human productivity to new heights. Your teams need to feel appropriately skilled, empowered and equipped to effectively use GenAI to complement their human innovation and creativity. Outsourcing the more mundane, repetitive tasks to AI, GenAI or other tools provides opportunities for employees to augment their capabilities and do more strategic work.

Just as you might foster an innovation-based culture, organisations need to create an environment and culture around AI and GenAI. That culture needs to provide the education, transparency of information and space to allow safe experimentation with new tools. The combination of these will unlock the potential of the human-machine partnership and advance innovation faster.

In South Africa, the first priority is to accelerate customers’ journey to AI. To do so, we are offering our customers a free test environment where we will work with you to build a proof of concept around your specific AI requirements.

Interested parties can also join us at our annual Dell Technologies Forum on 7 November 2024 at the Kyalami International Convention Centre.