Generative AI is reshaping the workplace, but many employees are still unsure how to use it.
PwC, a Big Four professional services firm, is addressing that gap with “prompting parties.”
In 2023, PwC announced it was investing $1 billion over three years to expand its AI capabilities. Later that year the company launched My AI, an upskilling initiative for employees to get trained on how to use AI responsibly.
But Leah Houde, the chief learning officer at PwC, told Business Insider that after the initial AI trainings, there was still a skill gap when it came to employees actually putting the technology to use, even though employees wanted to know more about how to use it.
In 2024, AI was among the top five terms searched in PwC’s internal learning and development platform, compared to being in the top 15 in 2023 and not even in the top 100 in 2022, PwC represenatives told BI.
“The cognitive load that it takes to just try something new in the course of doing what you’re normally doing is hard,” Houde said, adding that many employees just didn’t know where to start with AI prompts, which are the written instructions given to an AI tool in order to elicit a useful response.
People needed a safe, low-stakes place to play with the tools. That’s where the AI prompting parties came in.
The group sessions, which can be run independently amongst teams or by a company AI leader, are aimed at making employees comfortable using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatPwC — the company’s internal version of ChatGPT.
The sessions focus on real use cases, so employees can collaboratively experiment with using AI to help them solve a problem or accomplish a task that’s specific to their team.
Houde said the sessions are like a “playground where I’m not working on a client deliverable or writing an email to my boss or something that might give me anxiety that I don’t want to mess up with AI.”
She said experimenting in a group setting also allows employees to learn from each others’ prompts, giving them new ideas about what AI can do. It’s also made them more likely to try out AI on their own time too, Houde said.
Since launching in March, PwC said it has hosted nearly 500 prompting parties and over 880 more have been requested, so they are scaling up to meet the demand.
Houde said becoming familiar with AI was especially important for employees at PwC as a professional services firm, since the company’s clients often turn to its employees to get their own questions about AI answered.
Workforce experts previously told BI’s Tim Paradis that getting employees up to speed with AI is necessary, and that it will require the help and investment of employers.
A survey published by Slack in November found the rate of AI adoption among desk workers had plateaued, despite companies continuing to invest heavily in AI for their business.
But Houde said it’s not just AI or other technical skills that employees at PwC want more training on. Terms like “inclusion” and “inclusive mindset” are among the top searched on the company’s training platform every year.
“The thing that it says to me is that the human interaction is always going to matter,” she said.
Going forward, Houde said she’s most excited about how AI can be used to create personalized learning and development plans for people based on their current skills and where they want to go in their careers.
Instead of generically recommending the same trainings to everyone, AI can flag trainings that are most relevant to each individual.
“AI is now enabling us to understand the skills our people have and make connections between the skills that they have and the skills that they’re going to need to progress,” Houde said.
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