The most common pattern across enterprises today isn’t AI resistance, it's AI chaos. Leaders are convinced that 10x efficiency is within arms reach if only their employees use AI the right away, and the pressure to prove outcomes is circling every leadership meeting conversation. Plenty of teams are investing in subscriptions to the top models for their team – Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Co-Pilot, with little to no direction beyond “use it every day, and share what’s working with the team.”

Independently some users are in fact finding ways to make themselves more productive, creating automations in silos or experimenting with agentic solutions if given the freedom to do so, but most of that progress goes unseen and unmeasured.

Across a majority of organizations the most common use case still remains prompting AI for general summaries, ideation, and copywriting. Not because people are lazy, but because no one is telling them what good AI use actually looks like.

Getting clear and measurable results from this new technology may feel overwhelming, especially when it seems like some people are able to automate every administrative task from their life with teams of autonomous agents and tools like OpenClaw, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some clear steps to transforming your capability when it comes to this emerging technology.

First, shift from broadly consuming content on social media from creators making broad claims of their mastery, often designed to push a specific self-serving agenda, and start connecting with professionals and experts actually executing with these tools within the context of your own work.

Free live online classes with programs like School16 feature power-users that breakdown how AI is actually used within specific functional areas like Sales, Customer Success, Product, Operations, Marketing, and more allowing you to interact with people in a live environment where questions can be raised, claims can be challenged, and real context is provided for what’s relevant to you. For smaller, more nimble teams, founders that are running entire cross-functional AI agents in production break down their own systems to help you practice systems thinking and see what AI native can actually look like, and where it breaks.

If you’re still in the early stages of getting comfortable with these tools, learn the fundamentals first. Don’t think about creating some complex system, or implementing autonomous agents. The technology isn’t developed enough yet to work well out of the box, and any agentic work requires careful setup and daily monitoring over long periods of time before it works. Trying too much at once, like attempting to take on a large project without breaking it down into smaller more achievable parts, is only likely to make you more frustrated.

Start with something very simple like using make.com or Zapier to connect your AI note taker to your company issued OpenAI license and email client to do one specific task like draft a post-meeting follow up email based on inputs from your call notes with a well crafted ChatGPT prompt and put it into your drafts folder for your review.

Tweak your prompt, and your implementation until it’s just right over the course of a week and make sure you are still in the loop to ensure quality control, avoiding automating something that might start to hallucinate. Later, you can get more sophisticated and integrate other AI tools that can check outputs and quality with less input from you.

Some organizations now organize monthly hackathons or Lunch and Learns to promote AI use and the public sharing of wins, but you don’t have to wait for such an initiative to get the same value for yourself. Proactively seek out people within your company that seem to be doing something interesting with AI, even if they’re in another department.

Get time on their calendar, and come prepared to ask questions on their process, not only what they’ve done but how they learned to do it. Then, ask them to give you feedback on a priority problem you’re experiencing and see if they’re open to giving you ongoing guidance as you explore tools yourself. Pretty soon you might find yourself in a small working group of internal innovators that others recognize and come to for help.

As you work to move beyond just simple high level usage of the tools your company is investing in, remember to proactively document your work and quantify the impact of your experiments, whether that’s measuring time saved, or coming up with a set of metrics that you track that can later be attributed to increased performance or even revenue growth.

This is important not only to justify additional investment in time and resources around the tools that’ll make your job easier, but to satisfy the productivity output concerns plaguing many upper managers today, who have the responsibility of reporting these outcomes to their own bosses.

Furthermore, even if your own institution hasn’t yet announced it, many organizations are starting to base employee performance reviews in part on their ability with and usage of AI. Getting ahead of documenting and tracking your work will empower you to advocate for yourself with hard data when the time comes to evaluate your bonus compensation or potential for promotion.

Lastly, remember that acquiring any new skill always starts with frustration, mistakes, and the feeling that you’re behind. Regardless of external pressures, everyone learns at their own pace and everyone must start with developing a strong foundation in their new area of study. Don’t be afraid of the manual work required to get something working even part of the way correctly.

None of the expert operators that are mastering AI were born with that knowledge. They spent hours studying the tools, reading documentation, and playing around with implementations that would refuse to work as intended, until something finally clicked. Even once they have something functional, it still requires manual work and revision to make sure things don’t break.

If it sounds hard, then remember it is, but the eventual utility, time savings, and skills acquired through this process are worth the effort. Being an early adopter will bring you the benefit of staying ahead of future advancements in technology, and will make you indispensable to leaders and managers that are looking for the expertise that’s being developed realtime by you.

Disclaimer: The authors are affiliated with School16, a resource mentioned in this article.