🖤 Open Works #032 Make My Company AI Fluent Now. Bye.

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

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📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🤦 Edition 30: When Performance Feels Like A Process Not A Practice – a framework to revive and our favourite examples from other Open Orgs.

🎯 Edition 29: Increasing Manager Proactivity—With Extreme Clarity – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 28: How To Scale Your People Team As Your Company Grows – a framework for thinking about this and industry benchmarks

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve It

🏃 TL;DR:

• Don’t try to own AI—focus on enabling AI readiness.

• Shift from vague “adoption” to clear “exploration”.

• Help teams find ‘jobs to be done’ where AI can help.

• Build safety, visibility, and lightweight structure.

⚡️ The Problem

When leadership says “let’s adopt AI,” everyone hears something different. For some it’s exciting. For others? Existential dread. Cue analysis paralysis.

Most teams either want to explore AI or are leveraging it under the radar anyway. They just don’t know:

• What’s allowed?

• What’s expected?

• Where do we even start?

And meanwhile, your People team is running at 120%. You don’t have time to run a company-wide AI transformation project. And you shouldn’t have to.

💡 The Shift: From “Adoption” to “Usefulness”

Instead of asking teams to use AI, help them get clearer on:

This changes the conversation from tech-first to outcome-first—and makes it easier for teams to engage without fear.

🧠 A Light-Touch People Team Playbook

1. Start With: Where is the friction?

Frame AI exploration as a hunt for friction, not tools. Encourage teams to ask:

• What tasks drain time, energy, or attention?

• Where are we copy/pasting the same thing, over and over?

• Where do we hit decision bottlenecks, or repeat internal comms?

These are great Jobs to Be Done candidates for AI augmentation. Think:

• Drafting job descriptions → [Custom JD generator]

• Synthesising survey comments → [GPT-powered theme summariser]

• Responding to inbound support emails → [Auto triage assistant]

• Prepping interview feedback → [Scorecard-to-summary GPT]

🛠️ Framework: 3 Filters for Good AI Use Cases

If you tick 2 of 3, these are prime ‘custom GPT’ candidates ✅

2. Run an AI Themed Hackathon

Create a Miro board that teams can use to self-discover AI opportunities.

Suggested sections:

• ✅ What processes take the most time?

• 🌀 Where are we seeing context switching or repetition?

• 💭 What manual tasks could be improved with smart automation?

• 🤔 What are we curious to try AI for?

Host this as a 24 hour asynchronous jam. Invite folks to spend 30mins or so whenever they want during the 24 hours to contribute to the board

You’ll get some great insights—and probably identify some surprising quick wins. 🎉 

3. Document and Communicate Practical Guidelines On AI Usage

This is a good moment to collaborate with Tech/Security.

Also a great moment to not write a 224-page policy.

Start lightweight: what’s 🟢 Green, 🟠 Yellow, 🔴 Red?

🟢 Green = safe to explore → internal task helpers (e.g. summaries, drafts, prep work)

🟠 Yellow = handle with care, aka needs more “human-in-the-loop” → anything external-facing or making decisions

🔴 Red = do not use → customer data, personal info, financials in public models

Make it a simple notion 1 pager. Share it. Pin it. Loom it. Take stock in a month and see if it still holds.

4. Build AI Confidence Into Culture Rituals

• Monthly “AI Demos + Donuts” = show what’s working (10 mins)

• Async “GPTs We Made” channel in Slack

• 🎉 “GPT MVP of the Month” for the most helpful internal agent

It’s about #visibility, #safety and #momentum.

🔥 Bonus: Quick Win Ideas to Kick Things Off

Here are 5 places we’ve seen startups get instant traction with AI:

Sometimes the best way to accelerate adoption is to just show what's possible.

✨ Final Thought:

AI adoption shouldn’t feel like another top-down initiative.
It should feel like an invitation to work smarter, with tools you shape around your workflow.

✅ Next Steps:

• Run a low-lift “AI Opportunity Hackathon”

• Share the “3 Filters” for AI use cases across the org.

• Launch a “GPTs We’ve Built” Slack thread or wall of fame.

• Create your one-pager of green/yellow/red AI use zones.

📚️ Good resources from openverse.fyi 

🤖 Sazzle Survey Analyser GPT (Open Org)

🤖 Vi Competency Path Designer GPT (Open Org)

📔 AI Data Protection Playbook, by Vanessa Gilardi

📕 Generative AI Policy [Template], by Sarah Woods

📖 AI Policy, by HiBob

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 480+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

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