Helping Employees Succeed With GenAI

Spotlight
Article
AI and Machine Learning
Helping Employees
Succeed with Generative AI
How to manage performance when new technology brings constant
and unpredictable change by Paul Leonardi
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HBR / Spotlight Article / Helping Employees Succeed with Generative AI
Helping Employees Succeed

with Generative AI
How to manage performance when new technology brings constant and
unpredictable change by Paul Leonardi
From the Magazine (November–December 2023) / Reprint S23062
Michael Brandon Myers
If one universal law regarding the adoption of new technologies existed,

it would be this: People will use digital tools in ways you can’t fully
anticipate or control. The arrival of generative-AI-based technologies
using large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Bard raises
a critical question for leaders in all types of organizations: How can
you manage employees when the capabilities at their fingertips are
constantly changing and the effects of those changes are unpredictable?
Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 1
Two characteristics of generative AI make this problem more

challenging than it was with previous digital solutions. First, ChatGPT is
one of the most widely diffused and fastest-adopted products in history.
Just two months after launch it had 100 million users. Instagram took
two and a half years to acquire that many. Facebook took four and
a half years. The faster technology spreads, the less time users have
to learn from one another and mimic patterns of use. Second, unlike
virtually any other digital technology we’re accustomed to, AI-enabled
tools are designed to change by themselves—continuously. Each time
you provide new data to an LLM to produce text or computer code,
the technology learns and its capabilities grow. The things it can do
for you next week won’t be the same as the things it could do for you
this week. Thanks to the autonomous learning that characterizes the
most-advanced AI-based tools, your employees aren’t learning to use a
new technology once—they are learning to use it nearly every time they
engage with it.
During a three-year research project with 10 knowledge-intensive

companies at the leading edge of AI use, I devised a framework—
STEP—that can help employees take advantage of new technologies.
STEP consists of four interrelated activities to help leaders ensure
that employee-facing AI plays a positive and productive role in
their organizations: (1) segmenting tasks for either AI automation
or AI augmentation; (2) transitioning tasks across work roles; (3)
educating workers to take advantage of AI’s evolving capabilities and to
acquire new skills that their changing jobs require; and (4) evaluating
performance to reflect employees’ learning and the help they give
others.
Several companies have already adopted the STEP framework. Their

early experiences have demonstrated that it meets three critical needs:
It empowers employees to actively participate in shaping their new
responsibilities. It allows leaders to redistribute tasks and reimagine

work roles in ways that add value to the company. And it provides a
way to deal with the new reality that technological change is no longer
episodic but, rather, a force that organizations and their employees
must manage continuously.
This article describes how leaders can deploy STEP and how three
companies (all of which have requested anonymity) have used it
effectively. They include a marketing agency I’ll call MarkCo, a medical
device manufacturer I’ll call HealthCo, and a metropolitan planning
agency I’ll call UrbanGov. (Disclosure: I have served as a paid consultant
for MarkCo and HealthCo.) Those organizations saw STEP as a new
way to enable and encourage employees to capitalize on AI. Lessons
from them will help leaders from other companies improve employees’
experience at work and create new value for their organizations.
[ 1 ]
Segmentation
No single AI will do all the things that one person does in a work role.
Informed leaders should ask, “How will AI affect the various tasks my
employees engage in?” To determine the answer, have your employees
create three categories: (1) tasks that AI can’t or shouldn’t do, (2) tasks
for which AI can augment workers’ actions, and (3) tasks that can be
automated by AI.
HealthCo adopted ChatGPT for its junior staff. Leaders encouraged

staffers to first determine the tasks for which the AI would not be
helpful. Determining how to comply with federal policy and how to
safeguard the company’s IP when working with outside consultants
quickly rose to the top of the list.
Next employees decided which jobs the AI could help them with. One
time-consuming task was ensuring that contracts accurately reflected
the details of requests for proposals (RFPs). Here ChatGPT was very
useful. After reading through an RFP and a standard contract template,
it could generate a draft contract that reflected the terms of agreement.
Paralegals could then review the draft for specific areas of concern that
would need to be amended.
Finally, employees identified tasks that could be completely automated.

One was the laborious job of emailing outside parties requesting
changes to a contract. The AI could automatically generate those emails
by reading through revised contract language.
Once the junior staffers had segmented their tasks into those three
buckets, they began figuring out how the AI could augment or automate
some of them. A preliminary analysis at HealthCo suggested that as a
result of the deployment, the staffers each managed to free up five hours
a week for additional tasks.
Unlike virtually any other digital

technology we’re accustomed to, AI-
enabled tools are designed to change by
themselves—continuously.
All the successful companies I studied encouraged employees to take

the lead on segmentation and asked them to experiment with the
tools. Their leaders convened meetings at which employees discussed
the results of their experimentation. They allowed employees to help
them reach consensus on best practices. Employees were proud that
their leaders trusted them to deploy their expertise, and being part of
the experimentation and planning gave them insight into how their
companies would use AI, reassuring them that automating part of their
jobs wouldn’t put them out of work.
[ 2 ]
Transition
Because AI either helps complete work tasks faster and more accurately
(augmentation) or takes some of them over completely (automation),
some employees will have less to do after AI is deployed. In some
cases companies might reduce head count. Yet among the 10 companies
I studied, only one eliminated jobs in response to the efficiencies
gained by augmenting and automating work. Two other, more common
strategies were to transition work roles by deepening or upgrading
them. Deepening roles allows employees to devote more time to certain
tasks than they were previously able to. Upgrading roles frees them
completely from some tasks and gives them more-critical ones instead.
MarkCo adopted a chat-based LLM to help junior associates create

marketing collateral, such as PowerPoint presentations. That gave them
time to spend on other tasks that added more value to the firm. Some
employees began to do more competitor analysis. Others focused on
testing and evaluating campaigns. Managers at MarkCo identified which
employees had the aptitude and the interest to deepen their knowledge
in those areas and drew on expertise within the company to create and
provide their initial training.
Upgrading roles involves having employees perform tasks that had

typically been conducted by someone more senior. For example, at
UrbanGov junior planners often spent much of their time building
land-use models for urban development. During the STEP segmentation
process they augmented and automated certain tasks, giving them the
bandwidth to assume scenario building and other higher-level tasks,
some of which had been done by senior planners. That meant UrbanGov
had to find new tasks for senior planners, so the lead planner turned
his own responsibility for managing relationships with city planners
over to the senior planners. “After careful evaluation, I decided to
give them a big chunk of my job,” he explains. “That allowed them
to feel comfortable giving up scenario building. Now I can focus my
efforts in new directions too, since I’m freed from maintaining all those
relationships.”
Deepening work roles was the most common strategy among the 10
companies in this study, representing nearly 70% of all transitions. Most
leaders found it easier to help employees identify new value-adding
activities within their roles than to take over tasks from more-senior
employees.
[ 3 ]
Education
The first two stages of the STEP framework require workers to learn
new skills, some of which are directly related to using data, algorithms,
and AI. Employees need to know how AI tools work, how to train
AI on documents or data proprietary to the company (often called
“fine-tuning”), how to create effective commands or prompts (“prompt
engineering”), and how to evaluate the validity of an AI’s predictions.
Because AI tools are constantly evolving, employees can’t learn new
skills once and be done. They need to revisit the segmentation process
and continually refresh their learning about AI’s capabilities and the
areas into which their work roles will transition. Over the three-year
period, leaders and employees at the companies I worked with went
through segmentation and transition an average of two and a half times.
Employee education was thus a top priority.
HealthCo, MarkCo, and UrbanGov all embraced the need for continual
employee reskilling, but in different ways. For AI and data skills,
HealthCo created a “boot camp” for its employees. MarkCo contracted
with a local university to create custom programs for teaching
employees those skills. The university devised tests that employees
had to pass to certify that they were “AI ready.” Every year the tests
change according to evolutions in the technology. UrbanGov, which had
a much smaller budget available, bought subscriptions for short courses
on AI, simulation, and data management from companies that offer
corporate learning, such as LinkedIn and Udacity. Employees on the
planning team were encouraged to complete one course each month,
whether they were directly using AI or not.
Companies that prioritized education had two things in common. First,

they embedded the ethos of learning in their culture. Leaders and
managers across the company framed AI as a learning opportunity.
Employees were not expected to know how to use AI perfectly or how
to segment their tasks around it. Instead they were expected to explore
its capabilities and take time to determine how best to incorporate it
into their work. Second, these companies provided time for employees
to engage in the learning opportunities they provided. HealthCo, for
example, expected employees to devote at least two days each quarter
to attend the boot camp or refresh skills they’d learned in it. UrbanGov
earmarked three hours a week for employees to take the online courses
to which they subscribed.
This shift to providing ongoing education for employees can have

other benefits, too. One company in the study found that employees
given learning opportunities associated with the implementation of
generative AI tools were roughly 30% less likely than those not given
such opportunities to leave the organization.
[ 4 ]
Performance
The final stage of the STEP framework requires managers to rethink

how they evaluate employee performance. Typically employees are
assessed on the speed, efficiency, creativity, or accuracy with which
they complete certain tasks, and most discussions regarding the impact
of AI focus on how their productivity will increase. But STEP gives
employees responsibility for determining whether they can use AI to be
faster or more accurate. As a result, performance evaluation shifted in
several ways at all the companies I studied. Segmentation and transition
quickly changed expectations regarding what tasks employees should
do and how. And because roles altered multiple times in a year, often
rendering objectives identified at the start of a performance period
obsolete, annual performance evaluations no longer worked. Every
company in the study shortened its performance evaluation period,
most often to quarterly.
In addition, workers were constantly interacting with new people. Many

of the updated performance evaluations I studied involved identifying
the people with whom an employee interacted most often to determine
whether that employee was a useful collaborator. Collaborators
themselves usually provided the evaluation. The advantage of this was
that they could better evaluate the help they received than managers
could. And because the evaluations were done at short intervals, an
employee could quickly put the feedback to use.
Of the companies I worked with, HealthCo had the most aggressive

and technologically advanced performance-evaluation system. Its data
scientists created a dashboard that drew information from email
communications, Slack use, and calendars to show whom employees
were most dependent on and who most depended on them. Every
six weeks—the length of HealthCo’s new evaluation period—the

dashboard automatically sent all employees a list of their most frequent
collaborators and asked them to rate their interactions with those
people. The data was compiled and shared with employees and
their managers so that employees could gauge their collaborative
performance and make changes. After two years using this new
approach, employees reported a 72% increase in their satisfaction with
the company’s evaluation system in comparison with the prior two
years.
[ ~ ]
Lessons for Managers
As companies have applied STEP, leaders have needed to adjust their

approach to managing their employees. Four principles have helped
them navigate the challenges associated with AI.
Trust employees to experiment. Leaders who have followed the STEP

framework have found that they do better when they let employees
lead the process of discovering how best to use AI. They can set broad
objectives, such as increasing accuracy or doing a particular task faster,
but they should allow employees to determine how best to segment
their work. That requires trusting them to make good decisions and
acknowledging the fact that as the people closest to the work, they know
best where AI can have the most impact.
Create conditions for learning and incentivize helping. Learning is the

real imperative of successful AI use. Employees must learn and relearn
how to use LLMs and other AI tools as they change, how to apply the
new capabilities those tools provide to their work, and how to conduct
new tasks that add value to the organization. Because employees need
to learn with and from others, it becomes essential to adjust how they
are evaluated and rewarded to ensure that they are motivated to help
one another.
Rethink workforce planning. We typically think of work roles in terms

of the tasks they involve. But as AI upends the distribution of tasks,
work roles will become more amorphous. Good leaders must figure
out how to forecast for head count and how to manage recruiting
and promotion in a world where jobs are dynamic rather than static.
That means they can’t just hire people who have deep expertise in one
specific task. They need to ensure that their experts have a range of
abilities and the potential to learn in adjacent areas.
Reimagine your own role. In the age of AI good leaders are those who
create the conditions that enable their employees to adapt in the face of
changing technologies. Managers need to develop a digital mindset for
themselves, their departments, and their teams. And when employees
use AI to start doing higher-value tasks, the best leaders will find
ways to personally provide value both up and down the organizational
hierarchy. The middle of the organization may well be the place where
creativity is the most important.
•••
The AI-powered organization is coming fast. Leaders should help their

employees use AI to create value for themselves and their companies.
STEP provides a useful framework for thinking through how AI will lead
to changes in work. Most important, it can assist leaders in teaching
employees to be successful with this new technology.
A version of this article appeared in the November–December 2023 issue of

Harvard Business Review.
Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology

PL Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and
advises companies about how to use social network data and new
technologies to improve performance and employee well-being. He is
the coauthor of the book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to
Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI.
@pleonardi1

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Spotlight

AI and Machine Learning

Helping Employees Succeed

Michael Brandon Myers

If one universal law regarding the adoption of new technologies existed,

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 1

Two characteristics of generative AI make this problem more

During a three-year research project with 10 knowledge-intensive

Several companies have already adopted the STEP framework. Their

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 2

responsibilities. It allows leaders to redistribute tasks and reimagine

HealthCo adopted ChatGPT for its junior staff. Leaders encouraged

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 3

Finally, employees identified tasks that could be completely automated.

Unlike virtually any other digital

All the successful companies I studied encouraged employees to take

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 4

MarkCo adopted a chat-based LLM to help junior associates create

Upgrading roles involves having employees perform tasks that had

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 5

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 6

Companies that prioritized education had two things in common. First,

This shift to providing ongoing education for employees can have

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 7

The final stage of the STEP framework requires managers to rethink

In addition, workers were constantly interacting with new people. Many

Of the companies I worked with, HealthCo had the most aggressive

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 8

six weeks—the length of HealthCo’s new evaluation period—the

Lessons for Managers

As companies have applied STEP, leaders have needed to adjust their

Trust employees to experiment. Leaders who have followed the STEP

Create conditions for learning and incentivize helping. Learning is the

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 9

Rethink workforce planning. We typically think of work roles in terms

The AI-powered organization is coming fast. Leaders should help their

A version of this article appeared in the November–December 2023 issue of

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 10

Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 11

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