I had a good conversation with someone yesterday about the state of AI training and he asked me what the key issues are that people face when learning Gen AI in my workshops.
1️⃣ The first obvious issue is tech literacy – people not being tech-savvy. For the older generation, some have become overly-reliant on mobile devices, and they struggle to differentiate between a web app (ChatGPT in the browser) and a mobile app (ChatGPT app). This matters when we have to visit web apps like Google Whisk that don’t exist as mobile apps. This also becomes a problem when we have to do data exercises where there’s a lot of cutting and pasting of text or numbers. iPads and iPhones won’t cut it, you need a laptop computer and preferably a mouse.
2️⃣ The second is a reliance on just one or two free AI apps. Most people only know ChatGPT, followed by Copilot (because it is installed on all Windows PCs). I share with them what other apps in the Google ecosystem (Gemini, NotebookLM, AI Studio, Flow) can do, and I also encourage them to try other AI apps like Lovable and n8n. I also ask them to try a month’s subscription to their favourite AI app to unlock features they may not even be aware of.
3️⃣ The third is data management. I’ve observed that more and more people don’t organise their files properly, perhaps again due to the impact of mobile devices. It’s important to know where to find your data so you can feed it to Gen AI for processing. If your files are all over the place and you rely on AI’s own training data, then you may experience a higher rate of AI hallucinations or irrelevant output.
4️⃣ The last issue is mindset. Those who pay the workshop fees themselves tend to be the most enthusiastic and inquisitive, and those who are sponsored by their company may ask “What am I doing here?”. That’s my challenge then as the AI coach – to bring the two types of people together and excite them equally with what is possible with AI.
