Hi {{first_name|there}},
I'm Dan Belhassen, founder and CEO of Neovation, and this is the first issue of Putting AI to Work, a short weekly letter about how organizations learn and manage knowledge in the age of AI.
In mid-2024, Anthropic's CEO said AI training runs costing around $1 billion were already underway, as Stanford's AI Index reported. By Training magazine's estimate, US companies spent $874 per learner on training people last year. Put side by side:
What a stark difference! Both kinds of training are bought for the same reason: so the one being trained does more useful work, whether that's a model or a person. We use AI every day at Neovation both for our products and how we work internally, but what strikes me is how differently the money flows when the learner is a person compared to training an AI.
In the same Training magazine survey, only 41% of companies said their training budget went up last year, and 16% said it went down.
Meanwhile, the need keeps growing. When PwC surveyed more than 49,000 workers this spring, nearly two-thirds (64%) had used AI at work in the past year, yet only 51% said they had access to the learning they need, down from 59% the year before. More people are using AI every year while fewer of them say they're being taught the skills they need to be successful in their jobs.
One of the gaps is how much of the money a company spends on AI gets wasted. A model trained at enormous cost only makes your organization more productive once your people know how to use it well.
Teaching them is unglamorous work: how to ask an AI tool a good question, how to check what it gives back, and where it fits in the job they already do. It also determines whether the tools pay off.
So if you're making the case for a training budget this year, the AI investment your organization has already made may be your best argument for teaching your team to use it well.
Building your team’s AI skills is possibly the most important investment you can make. Especially if that investment is zero dollars. We built a free course for exactly this: AI Prompting Essentials, a beginner's course from our Practical Prompting Academy, teaches the fundamentals of prompting with any AI tool.
It takes about five and a half hours at each person's own pace and ends with a certificate, and your whole team can take it with no approvals or per-seat fees. Start the free course.
Dan Belhassen
Founder & CEO, Neovation
From Neovation
AI training built around your work. When your team is ready to go past the basics, we build AI training around your own tools, your policies, and the decisions your people make, so they learn to use AI in their own jobs and to check what it gives them before acting on it. It's delivered as SCORM into the LMS you already use. Explore custom AI training
Meet us in Las Vegas. Jennifer Bell, Josh Flower and Brayden Anderson will be at Learning Leadership on November 2 and 3 (kiosk LL13), then at DevLearn from November 4 to 6 (booth 525, MGM Grand). If you're going, tell us you'd like to meet and we'll find a time with you. I'd like to meet at DevLearn
One question. Has your organization bought AI tools without budgeting to teach people how to use them? Hit reply and tell me how you're handling it.
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