“I don’t know what AI can do”

The biggest barrier to a team using AI isn't the price or the technology: people don't know what the tool can do, so they can't see how it could help them. We call that the imagination gap. A concrete win on a task of their own helps close it more than an abstract tutorial.

The same phrase came up in almost every assessment we did this year. An administrator who has worked with Excel for twenty years said it. So did her manager: I don't know what AI can do, so I don't know how it could help me.

Why isn't a course enough?

A course teaches the tool in the abstract: here's the chat, here's how to write a prompt, here are the features. It leaves the employee with the hard part: translating all of that into their own work. That translation is exactly what they haven't learned yet. Without it, the course is quickly forgotten.

What closes the gap?

Seeing their own task done. When someone takes something they do every week — compiling a report, answering recurring questions or organizing scattered data — and sees AI help resolve it, the question changes. It stops being what AI can do and becomes what else they could use it for.

When someone automates their first task, they start looking for uses themselves.

Where should you start?

With a specific, repetitive task in the role of the person dealing with it. In the small businesses we work with, administration is often a useful first step: plenty of volume and repetition, and people who value recovering time. The win has to belong to them, rather than being an example from another company.