How British Columbian Companies Can Harness AI the Right Way
On a recent episode of Hard Fork (episode 150), hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton briefly touched on reports of how AI is being used in real Fortune 500 companies. In this conversation, they mentioned two broad philosophies relating to implementing AI in your company, and it got me thinking… What are British Columbian companies doing? The two broad categories that they identified were “Top-Down” and “Bottom-Up”, and what they found was rather interesting.
⬇️ Top-Down
A top-down method to implementing AI means it comes from management, dictating how AI agents are to be used by their employees. At first glance, this seems great! More standardization, better control, and theoretically more adoption of AI in everyone’s workflow.
However, this approach can run into some issues when it comes to implementation. AI is most useful when it is given very specific guidelines and very well-defined jobs. These guidelines and definitions can be hard to spot if you’re a manager overseeing a team instead of an employee actually doing the work. It may be that what seems like a good application for AI is actually just a busywork project, and all the while, the employee might have a better application in mind. This leads us to our second category for AI rollout…
⬆️ Bottom-Up
This approach centres the individual employee in implementing AI usage. Instead of being given a list of tasks that you must use AI for, this approach encourages employees to experiment and find their best-fit use-cases for AI. Nothing prescribed, nothing forced, but at all points empowered to find the best way that they can make themselves more efficient with AI.
This approach tends to work better because it understands the simple fact that nobody knows what your employees need better than your employees.
❓ What This Means For You?
In BC, many businesses—whether in forestry, tourism, or tech—are still in the early stages of figuring out how AI fits into their workflows. A bottom-up approach ensures that even small teams can experiment without needing big, top-down mandates.
This means that as you are looking for ways to streamline your business, you shouldn’t look for how you can mandate a one-size-fits-all for all of your employees. Instead, you should be giving your employees the tools they need to solve their own problems themselves, with AI.
One easy way to do this is to add Microsoft Copilot to an existing 365 subscription. If your team spends any time in any of Microsoft’s suite (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc) Copilot is already up to date with that! That means as soon as your employees think of a use case for AI, their personal copilot is already up to date and ready to go!
💡 Ready to supercharge your business with AI? If you’re curious about how you can implement a bottom-up approach to AI in your company, reach out to our team at info@atws.ca. We’d be happy to chat about how we can help you roll out AI solutions in your company, whether you’re in BC or beyond.