A Skeptical (Yet Practical) Primer on Workplace AI

If you contemplated your five-year career development plan in 2020, you probably did not have "learn to use artificial intelligence" on your card. If you did, you're probably in a highly specialized field — or you're psychic.

Generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, ruptured the American digital landscape in late 2022, reframing a great many work tasks — from writing advertising copy to creating legal documents to developing lesson plans.

Many people in the workforce wonder how to embrace the rapid spread of GenAI in the workplace. Those aged 50 and older are concerned about AI and ageism: an AARP survey released in August 2024 noted 61% of 1,010 survey respondents feared replacement by AI.

Older workers who are keen to pick up GenAI skills often are discouraged by confusing, conflicting or just plain overhyped information. Fortunately, people advocating sensible approaches to GenAI and others championing aging workers are partnering to teach older employees the skills required to stay competitive with younger colleagues. This includes how to use AI to augment, rather than supplant, talent.

Adoption of GenAI at work skyrocketed from 2023 to 2024. A McKinsey & Company survey released in early 2024 noted 65% of respondents said their organizations were using GenAI in day-to-day work — up from one-third who reported the same thing in a 2023 survey.

Despite that, job-specific AI training is hard to find. The AARP survey said just 7% of those surveyed had received position-specific AI training, although nearly half — 48% — would like such training.

Dave Birss, one of LinkedIn's top instructors for GenAI skills, said business leaders are struggling to find the most strategic uses of AI, resulting in uneven or even ineffective deployment. "There are a lot of misaligned expectations," he said.

Both Birss and Marci Alboher, vice president of narrative change at CoGenerate and author of "The Encore Career Handbook," said curiosity about using GenAI appears to break along early-adopter/late-adopter lines, rather than age.

"It really defies generational expectations," Alboher said. "The people who see the benefits to AI are tech-curious in other ways as well."

At CoGenerate, Alboher studies how different generations can collaborate, connect and innovate at work. As a result of that work, she says she observes that those over age 50 often have previous experience with rapid technological changes, making them savvy, nuanced users of new technologies.

"While there are arguments that digital natives take to this readily, it's just as strong a narrative that older workers are used to adapting and evaluating technologies and seeing the advantages as well as the risks," she said.

According to Birss, who led corporate education initiatives focused on creativity and innovation before turning his attention to GenAI instruction, most professional users will need to learn two basic skills to use GenAI effectively: how to craft a prompt, and how to interact with it to refine its output.

Without instruction, he says, "people think they know how to use AI, but they mainly use it like a search engine." In his classes, he teaches that prompt crafting is learned by exposure to good prompts, practice customizing pieces of good prompts, and finally writing new prompts for specific tasks.

He notes that being able to hold a "conversation" with the GenAI interface is key to improving its output.

"You should be thinking of your AI as the world's most intelligent intern," he asserted. "It knows more than any human alive. But it's absolutely ignorant about the way your organization works, about the way that you work, about what you value in the output. . . . Your job when you are writing a prompt, communicating with the AI, is you are briefing it."

Another critical skill is reviewing the output to ensure GenAI has not introduced erroneous information or inflated anyone's expertise.

Next Avenue Influencer in Aging Tom Kamber, the executive director of Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) and Senior Planet from AARP, says Senior Planet offers classes on spotting AI scams and "deepfakes" in audio and video because it's critical to have skills for evaluating output produced by AI and be able to spot mistakes, untruths or hallucinations.

"There is a lot of non-original content (produced by AI) out there now," he said. "If you're in a professional environment and checking someone's work, you have to realize it may not be original. You will need to ask more pointed questions to determine if they know what they say they know."

Kamber's organization offers several ways GenAI skills online and in-person at four Senior Planet centers and hundreds of partner sites across the country. Older adults, working or not, can attend lectures, workshops and multi-week classes that introduce basic AI concepts, teach attendees how to use AI image generators like DALL-E, and allow them to try out creating prompts with ChatGPT and other platforms.

A distinctive feature of Senior Planet's GenAI instruction, Kamber said, is never assuming prior knowledge. Even the term "artificial intelligence" is explained before moving on to AI tools.

"Our training doesn't use a lot of acronyms, TikTok videos or pop culture references," he said. "We cover what Large Language Models (LLMs) are, show them the interfaces like ChatGPT, and let participants try out different things. We cover prompts and how to strategically use prompting interfaces. We also cover how to deal with hallucinations and how to check data you get from GenAI."

Beyond Senior Planet, other organizations offering entry-level GenAI training include LinkedIn Learning, Google, Amazon's AWS platform and Intel. Many introductory options are low-cost or free.

To get the most out of an AI-for-work learning experience, Alboher recommends pairing training on Gen AI with co-mentoring a younger colleague. Co-mentoring is similar to a traditional mentor-protégé relationship but includes from the outset acknowledgement of mutual sharing.

"Most mentor-protégé relationships become co-mentoring if they are successful," she said. In a co-mentoring relationship focused on AI, "The older person may bring experience in how to ask smart questions, and how to refine prompts. The younger person may have discovered more tools."

Kamber and Birss shared examples of adults well into their eighties or nineties who embraced GenAI and used it to support businesses or augment special projects. Kamber said Senior Planet's GenAI classes are simply an extension of the mission of OATS, to "empower older adults with the tools and training necessary to take advantage of today's technology and use it to enrich their lives."

He noted, "Every year, older people have to learn something new, and for the past couple of years it's been AI. People need to use these tools to live well."

Birss, who compiled his thoughts around intelligent AI adoption into the Sensible AI Manifesto earlier this year, asserted older workers can be leaders as GenAI matures technologically.

"The learning curve (for GenAI) is very shallow," he said. "The real skills in learning to use it are human. The 50-plus generation already has those skills. Our generation could actually turn out to be the best at managing this."