What cultural shifts are necessary for IT teams to fully embrace continuous upskilling, and how can CIOs drive these changes across their organizations?

I’m a culture maven. Culture is my bag. I named the culture we want to be with AI, and that’s a good tactic. Next year we’re launching ITV 3.0, which encompasses everything about the new way to work, including AI and many other things. Just throwing that out as a tactic because I find it useful. We’re ITV 2.0 now, but it’s time to reinvent the org around a new way of working.

Our culture has always been independent, do-it-yourself, just based on being a 100-year-old construction company. I almost had to give the IT team permission or tell them it’s OK to use AI to be more efficient. You’re not cheating—it’s making us a better group overall and each individual better at their job. Through the training and investment we’re making, they’re the front line, the center of excellence to help enable the company and push it out. I help them see themselves as the enabler in helping other people find ways to use it, and then help them incubate it and just be there to help the company find innovative ways to use AI where it makes sense.

I’m in a unique position were I’m at the beginning of this journey for us. Up until I got here, the IT department was really just the folks who fought the fires and kept email running. My culture shift is from order-taker to enabler of innovation and assisting the business in driving forward. My culture is shifting the mindset of my team so they understand they can be forward-thinking and present ideas for the business. From an AI perspective, the team is learning to embrace curiosity and continuing education. I’m really at a foundational level, trying to build my team from a cultural perspective.

We’re trying to address the culture piece with AI by doing lunch-and-learns and getting our team involved through presentations about AI, where it can benefit them and how it’s benefited them, to hopefully reduce fear about it taking jobs. The other side is making sure people understand it’s not going to take jobs. We’ll still have the human in the loop, but it will make them more productive. By being more productive, hopefully we won’t have to grow the staff as much as in the past but can actually maintain and produce even more. To me, that’s the key from a culture standpoint: not that it’s going to replace people, because we’ll still need people to review what it generates to make sure it’s accurate, but it’s going to help them be more productive.